In recent years, there has been a craze looking at the mathematics behind space explorations, demonstrated by the popular movie Hidden Figures–just recently, we saw another example.
On April 10th, 2019, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration photographed a black hole. You may be thinking, what exactly is a black hole? Well, a black hole is “a dense compact object whose gravitational pull is so strong that… nothing can escape, not even light.” And, according to NASA, they are caused by the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lifecycle.
This wasn’t just a black photo though, it was actually 55 million lightyears away! This means, this photo shows the black hole 55 million years ago. Crazy, right?
Why is this discovery so important then? It confirms Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory. Einstein was able to predict the size and shape of the shadow and his predictions match what EHTC has found! This gives even more credibility to this century old theory.
Furthermore, this gives us insight into blackholes closer to home, such as in the Milky Way. NASA and EHTC have both showed continued interest into researching the topic more.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2319/first-image-of-a-black-hole/
Abigail Smith
Milliennial Science 