Event Horizon Telescope Confirms Black Hole Shadow is ‘Real’

GS Paper III Science and Technology

Context:

‘Event Horizon Telescope’ Confirms Black hole Shadow is ‘Real’.

Scientists have unveiled new details of a colossal black hole 53 million lightyears away first photographed by the earth-wide Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017.
The feat provided the first visual evidence that black holes exist, confirming a fundamental prediction of Einstein’s general relativity.

Improved resolution & Coverage: Major Event Horizon Telescope findings include improved resolution & Coverage as compared with previous one.
Valuable insights : into the intricate dynamics near the Event horizon.
Bright ring & Dark Central Region: They again find a bright ring of the same size, with a dark central region and one side of the ring brighter than the other.
Asymmetric ring structure: The finding confirmed the presence of an asymmetric ring structure consistent with Gravitational lensing.
Stable ring formation process: The findings have reaffirmed the Stable ring formation process & other physical characteristics.

Event Horizon Telescope

Event Horizon Telescope

Event Horizon Telescope is a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration.
Objective : It was designed to capture images of a black hole.
- It offers scientists to research new frontiers of the Universe.
Technology deployed: The Event Horizon Telescope observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) to capture the images of black holes.

A black hole is a cosmic object with strong gravity that nothing can escape from it, not even light.
Black Hole Formation: When a massive star runs out of fuel to fuse, blows up, leaving its core to implode under its weight to form a black hole.
High Gravity: NASA explains the intensity of a black hole as “20 times the sun’s mass could fit easily in a 16 km ball”.
Invisible to Eyes: Since no light can escape, none can bounce back. This makes the black hole invisible to our eyes and telescopes that we rely on.
Mass: The mass of small black holes is around 5 to 20 times the mass of the sun (solar mass); for supermassive black holes, it is millions to billions times the solar mass

Einstein‘s theory of general relativity: According to it, When a massive star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the core’s mass is more than about three times the mass of the Sun, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole.
Gravitational singularity: It is the centre point of a black hole of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General Relativity. A black hole’s great gravitational pull emerges from its singularity.
Event Horizon : No light can escape the surface of a black hole, a boundary which is known as the event horizon.

Also Read: Black Hole Mass Gap

News Source : The Hindu

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