What's behind the picture hole "M87" black?

The Little Mohammed Al Gharbi

The world has lived a historic moment since yesterday, after the first image of a massive black hole in the center of the galaxy M88 was seen, staring like a monster's eye.

A small but precious picture that required global cooperation to turn the Earth into a giant telescope and photograph an object thousands of billions of kilometers away.

It also represented an unprecedented test to validate Einstein's ideas about the nature of space and time in very strong gravitational conditions, and about the role that black holes play in the universe.

The black hole is an area in a space of intense intensity and gravity reaches an amount that light can not escape. It is like a ghost in front of a dark background. So taking a picture of him seems almost impossible.

But thanks to the pioneering work of Stephen Hawking, we know that black holes are a black abyss. Not only do they emit huge amounts of plasma, they also pull away the distant physical objects toward them because of their enormous attractiveness.

The drawn material forms a circular disk around the black hole as it approaches the "horizon of the event," a point where light can not escape.

In this disc, the material turns some of its energy into heat by friction of the particles of matter. This process warms up the disc completely, as we warm our hands on a cold day by rubbing them together.

The closer the material approaches the horizon of the black hole, the greater the friction, and the brightness of this region will match the brightness of hundreds of suns. This is the light picked up by ATH along with the silhouette of the giant black hole.

Image production and analysis of this data have been a very daunting task for astronomers who can not normally shoot a single star in the M88 galaxy clearly, let alone a black hole in its center.

The process of capturing this image of the giant black hole in the heart of this galaxy, about 55 million light-years away, is like photographing an orange on the moon.

Earth-sized telescope
The ATH team needed to make this unprecedented image into a telescope the size of the earth itself. In the absence of such a giant machine, the team connected telescopes from all over the planet and integrated their data.

The data collected was 5,000 terabytes, which scientists needed to store to hundreds of hard drives before being inserted into a high-end computer.

Scientists have concluded that the mass of the giant black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun and is 40 billion km in diameter, which is larger than the diameter of the orbit of the most distant planets in the solar system.

Einstein is right
But the importance of this picture, which required all this effort, lies not in accomplishing anything unprecedented, but also in ascertaining the validity of the most important theories of universality, general relativity. Einstein was right. His general theory of relativity has passed two important tests in the most extreme circumstances of the universe in the last few years.

Einstein's theory of what was revealed in MESSE 87 predicted flawlessly, reinforcing its position as the most important cosmic theory that correctly describes the nature of space, time, and gravity.

The material velocity measurements on the center of the black hole correspond to the theory of relativity as it approaches the speed of light.

The researchers hope that more telescopes will be added to the ATH network soon, to get a clearer picture of these "monsters" wonderful.