As an astrophysicist, this is a thrilling day for me,” said National Science Foundation Director France A. Cordova.
The photo of the black hole at the
The team’s observations strongly validated the theory of general relativity proposed in 1915 by Einstein to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces. “We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago,” said astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. He said the research “verifies Einstein’s theory of gravity in this most extreme laboratory”. Black holes, phenomenally dense celestial entities, are extraordinarily difficult to observe by their very nature despite their great mass.
The black hole observed by the scientific team resides about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion kilometers. This black hole is an almost-unimaginable 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. “This is a huge day in astrophysics,” said US National Science Foundation Director France Crdova. “We’re seeing the unseeable.” “It did bring tears to my eyes,” Crdova added. The project’s researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 using radio telescopes in the US states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as in Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the global network.
As they analyzed the image and related data, astronomers also grew increasingly confident with other assumptions they’ve made based on theories about the workings of the universe. He added, “This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass.”
