After a long wait .. the first image of a black hole in history
Since the introduction of the first academic paper predicts the existence of black holes exactly eighty years ago, this shocking idea called for the imagination of scientists, artists, and writers, and has become fertile ground for miraculous scenarios that reach the limit of penetrating the walls of time through those mythical holes, but the curiosity of the human to see it remained a distant dream to achieve this evening Wednesday.
In Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo, six simultaneous press conferences were held to launch this historic story, accompanied by the first real image of a black hole seen by humans. The Horizon Horizon telescope - an international joint venture launched in 2012 using a global network of observatories - In the photo capture.
The picture of a black hole is located at the center of the M88 galaxy, about 55 million light-years away from Earth. The scientists began monitoring it two years ago along with another hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But the first picture could only be captured today, as scientists combined data from eight observatories from four continents to obtain the composite image.
Before that day, we had only imaginative drawings of black holes. They did not see because their enormous attractiveness absorbed everything, including light, but revealed itself through the substance that swallowed it. So the black hole in the picture appeared today as a dark black spot amid a halo of dust swirls and red light.
At the beginning of September 1939, American physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder presented the first academic paper on black holes, predicting that the star, which is about 25 times the size of the sun when depleted and its hydrogen fuel will lose balance, Nuclear fusion, begins to shrink under the influence of its attractiveness until it presses into a "supernova" and then turns into a black hole.
interestingly, the day the paper was published coincided with the invasion of Poland by the German army led by Adolf Hitler, causing the outbreak of World War II, where the theory of the superpower's preoccupation with scientific competition in another field was abruptly interrupted by the fact that Oppenheimer himself became the scientific director Of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first tested nuclear bomb on civilian heads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
the theory of black holes has been the subject of controversy since 1783 when physicist John Menchel imagined the presence of a dense star whose intense attractiveness absorbed everything until its own light. The general theory of relativity of Albert Einstein in 1915
demonstrated the possibility of black holes.
But quantum theory, which later emerged and Einstein initially rejected, increased confusion about what happens within the black holes. The "space-time" tissue, bent by the gravity of the hole at its extremes, reaches a point that is difficult to describe in theoretical mathematics at the center called the single point The size of the star is very large, with its mass as it is, and is similar to the pressure of the size of the globe to the size of a ball (or the size of a small building according to some estimates) with its mass remaining.
general relativity assumes that when something falls into a black hole that destroys its information, quantum physics says that is impossible. Scientists have long tried to find a system that reconciles the two theories, such as string theory, but verification remains controversial.
After World War II, the United States became the world's scientific center of gravity, and interest returned to the theory of black holes by American physicist John Wheeler. But the simulations of computing and radio techniques developed during the war were not enough to prove the existence of mysterious holes.
Scientists thought at the time that when a crime could swallow everything without escape, it would not be lost, but British physicist Stephen Hawking found a mathematician in the 1970s that the black hole could emit particles in radiation called Hawking radiation, The hole may evaporate until it disappears. Although some researchers succeeded early this year in simulating Hawking radiation experimentally, they did not confirm the existence of this radiation.
In 2015, scientists measured the gravitational waves created in the binary system in the black hole. This was considered the first tangible evidence of the presence of black holes, but the first view of these holes was realized only on this day, which will enter the history of science from the widest doors.
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