On April 10, the whole world witnessed one of the biggest events of the year in the science and astronomy industry: Successfully taking a photo of the first black hole in the universe in human history. Up to now, this is the only visual evidence of the existence of black holes in the universe.
In 2009, the goal of taking black hole photos was first set. Over the past 10 years, although today's kinhtechs have been greatly improved, they are still unlikely to be capable of taking black hole photos directly. In theory, a black hole glasses must be as big as the whole Earth to have a lucky chance. However, that was also the time when scientists thought of a way to combine many kinh stations at the same time to produce the most feasible results.
Eight different television stations around the world have been selected to carry out the mission. Since 2017, all 8 promoter stations (commonly known as the EHT event holdings thien van glass) have been adjusted to the correct orientation in the same coordinate to form an " eye" looking up to the sky with a size equivalent to the entire planet. ALMA station in Chile is expected to be the most crowded because it has a signal paneling design as big as an entire stadium.
To do the unimaginable thing, the EHT event's foot-and-mouth thien van kinh does not look directly at the black hole but captures the light circles around the black hole's mouth - the event horizon, the light emitted when matter crosses the deadly boundary, only goes without returning. The gas At the event's horizon heated up billions of degrees, creating a circle called the "bull of a black hole". Einstein's relativism predicted the existence of this area.
However, processing data taken by 8 tafes at the same time is not simple. They estimate that the whole photo could be as heavy as all the selfies of 40,000 people in their lifetime. Scientists had to use up to 5 PB (petabyte) of hard drive, equivalent to 5,000,000 GB.
Finally, in 2016, Bouman wrote an sophisticated algorithm that helps detect radio wave differences between satellites for home supercomputers to convert to photo formats. With the combination of a series of astronomical stations located around the world and a team of more than 200 people, we have achieved the following results:
The black hole is located in the center of the Milky Way Messier 87 - abbreviated as M87, 53 million light years away from us. It is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun, approximately the size of our Milky Way. It is estimated to be 1.5 light days wide, or 38 billion km. This is one of the " heaviest" black holes we have ever observed.
The image was created using radio Astronomical technology. The data is compiled, creating one of the most important images in the history of the astronomical industry.
