Black Hole, The Darkest Underbelly Of The Universe Caught On Camera For The First Time

In a triumph of science and its will to pierce right into the heart of the unknown, the astronomers for the first time in human history unveiled a picture of a black hole located 50 million light years away in the M87 galaxy, AFP has reported.

The black hole surrounded by a metaphorical ring of fire constituting the event horizon has a mass of 6.5 billion times that of the sun and is said to be one of the heaviest black holes in existence.

This image was captured with the help of an Event Horizon telescope array which comprised of eight widely placed participating radio stations throughout the world. A team of 200 scientists pointed at the M87 galaxy for a period of 10 days and the gathered data had to be stored in hard drives and flown to a processing unit due to its sheer size.

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Black holes are super massive dense gravitational objects whose escape velocity exceeds the speed of light meaning no particle can ever escape out of it. Hence despite being ominously termed black hole, its insides might be particularly well lit due to all the accumulated photons.

It is formed when a giant star much larger than the size of the sun dies (our sun in contrast would turn into a white dwarf) by collapsing under its own gravity.

In Popular Culture

Some of the instances of black holes in popular culture include the film Interstellar wherein Matthew McConaughey plunged into a black hole named Gargantura but eventually managed to make his way out.

This leads us to an almost SciFi theory proposed by late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wherein he proposed that the matter could escape the beast and end up in a different dimension.