The first photo of a black hole: scientists have presented evidence of its existence

On Wednesday, April 10, a message appeared on the Event Horison Telescope website about astronomers receiving the first ever photo of a black hole.

This outstanding scientific breakthrough will allow experts to learn hitherto unknown information about the black hole and discard the craziest theories about this mysterious space. Read more about the study below.

The unique discovery was reported today in a series of six articles published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. According to scientists, they managed to take a picture of the black hole in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy using the most powerful Event Horison Telescope ("Event Horizon"), which is an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes installed in different parts of the world.

Until today, many scientists have questioned the very probability of the existence of a black hole. And now, with these unique images in their hands, they can get closer to solving the appearance of these objects in the universe.

Today, several countries simultaneously held coordinated press conferences dedicated to this discovery.

Recall that the international project Event Horizon Telescope was launched in 2012 with a rather ambitious and even fantastic goal — to get a picture of a black hole. The fact is that black holes do not emit light, that is, they are virtually invisible in outer space.

Therefore, the task of scientists was to record radiation waves surrounding the event horizon before matter falls into eternal darkness. This object is called the "shadow" of a black hole. And the main difficulty in detecting it lies in its incredibly small size. Imagine as if you saw a grapefruit lying on the moon from Earth.

Until now, no telescope could cope with this task, but the UNT managed to obtain an image, which took scientists about 2 years to study and process.

In the photo, you can see a bright ring of light bending due to intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 million times more massive than the Sun.

To date, this image is the only convincing proof of the existence of black holes. Now scientists have more opportunities to study the regions of space-time, their event horizons and gravity.

Even now, experts are on the verge of a new discovery, because this picture practically confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, presented by him in 1905.