Through the haze, gases and clouds of dust, 5.5 million light years away, Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an earth sized virtual telescope formed by linking 8 radio telescopes around the earth, captured the first ever picture of a black hole. It has taken 200 scientists’ blood, sweat and tears to record petabytes of data, observe it and pack it in to a single image. Black holes appear to be invisible against the background and can only be viewed due to the bending of light affected by intense gravity of the black hole forming a halo around it.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said EHT Director Sheperd Doeleman. Before this, scientists only believed that black holes exist by observing the odd behavior of stars surrounding them but now it is backed up by visual evidence, proving Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Scientists and cosmologists are yet to dive deeper into the mysteries surrounding the existence of black holes.
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