![]() Nor do scientists know what ultimately happens to whatever falls into a black hole, nor what forces reign at the center, where, theoretically, the density approaches infinity and smoke pours from nature’s computer. Dense wrinkles in the primordial energies of the Big Bang? Monster runaway stars that collapsed and swallowed up their surroundings in the dawning years of the universe? Nobody knows how such behemoths of nothingness could have been assembled. “Black holes must be the most exotic major disrupters of cosmic order,” she said. The images released today bolster the notion of violence perpetrated over cosmic scales, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Event Horizon team. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes can be the most luminous objects in the universe. As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain, the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt out the side. Since then, scientists have devised detailed models of how this would work. Perhaps, astrophysicists thought, the energy was being liberated by matter falling onto supermassive, dense objects - later called black holes. In the 1950s, astronomers with radio telescopes discovered that pearly, seemingly peaceful galaxies were spewing radio energy from their cores - far more energy than would be produced by the ordinary thermonuclear engines that make stars shine. The mystery of black holes has tantalized astronomers for more than half a century. There, 26,000 light-years from Earth, and cloaked in interstellar dust and gas, lurks another black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million suns. The telescope array also monitored a dim source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. In all, eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the galaxy in Virgo on and off for 10 days in April 2017. The image emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. Janna Levin, a cosmologist and professor at Barnard College in New York, said, “What a time to be alive.” A telescope the size of Earth There can be no doubt this really is a black hole at the center of M87, with no signs of deviations from general relativity.” Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, and who shared a Nobel Prize in 2017 for the discovery of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, wrote in an email: “It is wonderful to see the nearly circular shadow of the black hole. “His theory has just been stress-tested under conditions of extreme gravity, and looks to have held up.” Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale, said that Einstein must be delighted. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out in the room and throughout a universe of astrofans following the live-streamed event. The results were announced simultaneously at news conferences in Washington, D.C., and five other places around the world, befitting an international collaboration involving 200 members, nine telescopes and six papers for the Astrophysical Journal Letters. As far as the team of astronomers could ascertain, the shape of the shadow is circular, as Einstein’s theory predicts. ![]() On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish like a dream. If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap. ![]() The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it. ![]()
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