The black hole resides at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, named for the 18th-century French astronomer who discovered it. Read: About that monstrous black hole we’re all orbiting “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” says Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the head of the effort, known as the Event Horizon Telescope. Astronomers on Wednesday released the first direct image of a black hole, pieced together from observations by telescopes around the world. They have even detected them in gravitational waves, the faint ripples that distort the very makeup of space and time when two black holes collide.īut no one’s ever really seen a black hole-until now. They have detected them in bright beacons of ejected particles, the cosmic burps of a hearty meal. Mysterious as they are, they can be found.Īstronomers have detected black holes in the whirling movements of stars and spinning rings of gas and dust that coalesce around a seemingly empty spot in space. The light sinks past a point of no return and into an unknown realm that can only be imagined.īlack holes sound like an invention of science fiction, but they’re as real as the stars and planets and moons-they’re everywhere, millions and millions of them scattered across the cosmos. In a black hole, the force of gravity is so strong that anything that comes near, whether a puff of cosmic dust or an entire blazing star, is swallowed and devoured. At the darkest points in the universe, their boundaries perilous and invisible, space warps.
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