We ’re About to See the First Picture of a Black Hole. That’s a Big — Even Supermassive — Deal

A picture of a black hole is one of those great, self-negating concepts, like the sound of silence, the presence of absence or the lives of the dead. The nature of one refutes the other. But a picture of a black hole is set to arrive nonetheless — two pictures of two black holes, actually, on April 10, in simultaneous press conferences to be held at 9:00 AM EDT, in six different locations around the world. At those events—planned for Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo—astronomers will give humanity its first look at the black hole that sits at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. We’ll also see a vastly larger one at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, nearly 54 million light years from Earth. With that, astrophysics will have opened one more tiny crack in the wall of secrets that is the universe. (We’ll update this story with the photos when they become available.) True to the nature of the science, what will show up in the pictures will not be the black holes themselves. The defining feature of all black holes is that they are so dense, generating a gravity field so powerful, that nothing, not even electromagnetic energy—which, of course, includes visible light—can escape their pull. What the pictures will reveal instead will be the black holes’ so-called event horizons, the swirl of gas and dust and stars and light itself, circling the black hole drain, before they’re sucked inside neve...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news