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| New Black Hole Imaged by NASA's Event Horizon Telescope |
A New Black Hole Image changed the perspective of Astrophysics and Relativity
Highlights:
- NASA Captured the first ever image of a Black Hole
- The Image was captured by a radio telescope called "Event Horizon Telescope"
- The achievement has been made by United States National Science Foundation
- The Black Hole is about 55 million light years away from us.
- The mass of the Black Hole is about 6.5 billion times the mass of Sun.
- The Black hole is found in Messier 87
The mystery of the existence of Black hole remained unknown until it can be visualized through our eye. Scientists and Theoretical Physicists succeeded in proving the existence of Black Hole (A Major contribution to the theory of black hole was made by famous scientist
Dr.Stephen Hawking). But still it remained a mystery, that really the black hole exists or not?. To answer this question scientists and engineers around the world modified their telescopes to observe and image the existence of black hole in the Universe.
What is a black hole?
A Black Hole is a massive region in the aperture of Space which have gravity multiple times of the speed of light. Black hole is formed from a dead star (As per black hole formation theory). The region of space where you cannot find any stars, light spots or any other light source and the regions looks dark is called the region of black hole. It engulfs the nearby stars, planets and asteroids. The gravity is very much large, a single source of light cannot escape from it (which is imaginable).
Black Hole Imaged:
Finally, after the major discovery of the existence of "Gravitational Waves" that arises as result of collision of two neutron stars (i.e. black hole) in 2017. NASA achieved the milestone in imaging the existence of
Black Hole through Event Horizon Telescope in 2019. The image was released worldwide on 10 April 2019. The image made a turning point in understanding the evolution of Universe as well as black holes.
Black Hole Location and Distance:
The super massive black hole is found at the center of Messier object
Messier 87 (shortly called as M87) which is nothing but a elliptical galaxy located at
55 million light years away from our earth. The mass of the black hole is estimated to be
6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. The black hole has been monitored and spontaneously imaged by other observatories and ground based telescopes to observe the mysterious cycle of brightening and dimming of light. NASA other telescopes were
Chandra, NuSTAR, Swift, Fermi and an experiment on-board ISS (International Space Station) called
NICER - Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer Experiment. The black hole was looked at the center of our own galaxy Milky way.
Credits:
Image: NASA, Event Horizon Telescope
Tags: New Black Hole Imaged | Space Updates | Fornax Space Missions
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