Science and technology today How we managed to take a picture of a black hole
A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can ’ t get out . The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space . For centuries , physicists have theorized that an object with enough mass and density could trap even light in its gravitational field , just as you have to travel faster to leave Earth than you do to leave the Moon , there could be a place where you ' d have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape . And nothing moves faster than light . This can happen when a star is dying . Because no light can get out , people can ' t see black holes . They are invisible to humans but are they to the machines too ? Apparently not .
On April 10 th , a picture of black hole has been shown to the world . All those pictures we have seen so far in our text books or on the internet , all of those are illustrations . Until now . So how did the scientists do it ? It all started in 2017 , April 4 th . A group of telescopes on mountains across the planet switched on at the same time . For the next week they danced in unison , collecting radio waves dispatched from the center of our Milky Way galaxy and from the galaxy M87 . They are part of the so called Event Horizon Telescope ( EHT ). They goal was to work together and take the first picture of black hole . Scientists think there are black holes large and small all over the universe . We can see their fingerprints but we didn ' t have the mug shot . It is hard to directly imagine a black hole because they ' re either too small , too far away , or both . The black hole at the center of our galaxy , Sagittarius A *, has the mass of 4 million Suns , but it would fit inside to orbit of Mercury . To imagine it from Earth it would be like taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the Moon . But that ’ s not all . We would have to deal with huge clouds of dust and gas in between .
So many things had been taken in consideration , like the slice of light that has to travel all the way without getting knocked off course or absorbed by any of the gas or anything in between , and then it also has to make it through the Earth ' s atmosphere which a lot frequencies of light don ' t . They landed on a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters at the high frequency end of the radio spectrum . The chance of seeing a black hole was there as long as the weather cooperated with EHT . The weather had to be clear in all those places at a time when the Earth is oriented in such way for the telescopes can see the black hole . To create the EHT , astronomers had to upgrade , link , and synchronize eight pre-existing telescopes around the world , from Hawai ’ i to Spain to Antarctica . They collected petabytes worth of data , which was flown on hard drives to supercomputers so they could process it into a picture . Programs needed not just to stitch together the data , but to
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