How did we captured the Black Hole Powehi

 Black Hole Powehi | M87

On April 10, 2019 scientists got the first ever image of Black hole; that changed the way we look at universe forever. 

This black hole is at the center of galaxy M87, & is named Powehi.

Powehi is a black hole in the center of galaxy called M87. 

It is 55 million light years away from Earth & has a mass equals to 6 & a half billion Sun (6,500,000,000 * Mass of sun).

Powehi & M87 Galaxy

Until April 10, 2019 we really didn't know how a black hole looks like!

We just did simulations and presented, which looks something like this;

Simulations done by a super computer

Black holes are super heavy & massively dense objects that actually punctures/deform the space time blanket; generating enormous gravitational pull that tends light to change its path.

And this phenomena helps us to do simulations.

Click here - Black hole's gravitational pull

 
   

But how we captured this black hole?

Scientists all around the world worked for many years to understand how Black holes works & figure out how to picture them.

Theoretically to capture this massive black hole 55 million light years away, we need a telescope of a size of Earth, which is simply impossible.   

200 scientists from around the globe, working with 60 institutes in 20 different countries using 8 EHTs (Event Horizon Telescopes) made this possible.

Light or photons tends to change its path near the black hole, what we see in the image is actually the light particles that are coming form behind the black hole, escaped the black hole's pull & came to us through the inter galactic space.

The light orbits the black hole until it finally enters the Event horizon & inside the black hole.

The big break through - Click here

The reason why we see complete dark in the center of a black hole is because it completely pulls every photon around it making no possibility for light inside it to come out & reach us.

Although, what's exactly inside the black hole remains mystery, scientists believe that there is singularity at its core & that's a complete phenomena of quantum world & gravitation (thats what we know for now).

This first ever picture of the black hole in the center of M87 was created with an astonishingly large amount of data.

8 EHT (Event Horizon Telescopes) around the world captured collectively 4 Petabyte (4000 Terabytes) of information or 4,096,000 Gb of data to be specific; to create this image of Black hole.

Event Horizon Telescopes - Youtube

 

Lets take a case, 

Take a huge mirror that can reflect large amount of light coming from universe or deep space.

Now break it into several tiny pieces. Now to see what these several pieces reflected, you need to line up the data that these mirrors captured at a same time with no error, to see the image formed due to the reflection.

 

This is exactly what scientists did to captured this image of the black hole located 55 million light years away.

Instead of building a telescope as big as earth, we build 8 super powerful telescopes called EHT, put them on 8 different places of Earth at a very high altitude; around 15,000fts.

These EHTs were perfectly synchronized using Atomic Clocks that measures time with the highest accessory. 

The Amazing 8 EHTs

This atomic clock works on the principle that counts the vibrations of the atoms.

What actually happens is, we excite an atom with a laser or mazer, this causes vibration & the atom enters a lower or a higher stage releasing an energy packet of a particular frequency.

This frequency remains same for a same element.

we use Caesium-133, which showcases the high frequency of 9.19 GHz; this means in one second the atom will vibrate for 9.192x10^9 times. 

This atomic clocks losses around 1 second in 15 billion years, thats quite long.

With this accuracy, scientists synchronized all the collected data & created the algorithm to finally give us the first ever image of a black hole.

Katie Bouman a 29 year old computer scientist helped create the algorithm under the lead of Dr. Sheperd Doeleman.

although with so many things scientists still needed the perfect time when environment is clear at all 8 places around the world simultaneously; 1st week of April, 2019 was perfect, all clear sky at every location, within four days of data collections & 6 more for running the algorithms, Scientists finally gave us the decade's one of the most iconic picture :)

This is the black hole situated at the center of galaxy M87 called Powehi.

Powehi is a Hawaiian name which means - 'embellished dark source of unending creation'. 
  

And That's it. Today we mark the third anniversary of this beautiful iconic image of black hole.

Hats off to all the scientists & people who worked day and night to convert this into reality.

I can't takes my eyes off this astonishingly amazing picture.

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