Photographic Evidence of Black Holes

Today, April 10 2018, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope shared with us the very first photos of a black hole in Messier 87, a star cluster 55 million light years away from us. A really cool thing about this is how the photo matches up quite well with simulated images.

A great thing about this is that not only have we confirmed something about our universe, but we can also find out more. In 2015, scientists found the first detection of gravitational waves which was an astronomical discovery that confirmed a concept introduced many 100 years ago. Many gravitational waves are formed by the colliding and merging of black holes to make one larger black hole. The result causes waves that bend space and time, just like black holes do, that propagate through the entire universe.

In order to take the photograph of the black hole that was observed, 8 different observatories worked in collaboration to take images from their angles at certain times. They then combined the images into what we see now. While black holes may seem terrifying at first glance, but it is truly a sight to learn how they come about, and what exactly they are.

I hope you all find this as cool as those of us at Broad Culture do. This is some of the biggest pieces of science news, mostly physics and astronomy, in the past 10 years, maybe 100, more likely since ever. Hopefully one day we could find existence of wormholes (although it's unlikely, I just find them interesting because of the popular sci-fi series Farscape).