M87 Central Galactic Black Hole Halo Photographed with Event Horizon Telescope
As nationalism without inter-nationalism continues to mark down the discourse of the globe, some marked moments of science show the true beauty of inter-national collaboration through looking upward to the sky and outward from ourselves, especially in empirical evidence showing things previously only imagined. Recently, there was some news as to the nature of the most powerful gravitational wells in the universe: black holes. In a distant galaxy, at its center, there sits a gigantic black hole 40,000,000,000 kilometres across. It was photographed with a “network of eight telescopes across the world.” The details of the photography were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The network of telescopes is called the Event Horizon Telescope or EHT. The original experiment was proposed by Professor Heino Falcke of Radbout University (Netherlands). The galaxy for this monstrous black hole is M87. Falcke said, “What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System… 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.”
There is a “ring of fire” surrounding the circularity of the black hole. This halo surrounding the black hole is caused by gas becoming superheated and falling into M87’s black hole. The light from the bright halo surrounding the central…
