An international scientific team on Wednesday announced a milestone in astrophysics – the first-ever photo of a black hole – using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape.
IT VERIFIES EINSTEIN’S THEORY
The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.
It measures 40 billion km across – three million times the size of the Earth – and has been described by scientists as “a monster”.
The team’s observations of the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster, lend strong support to the theory of general relativity put forward in 1915 by physicist Albert Einstein to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.
“What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System,” Prof. Heino Falcke said. “It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.”