The First Picture of a Black Hole

IN THE NEWS: One of the most impressive things to happen in my lifetime has to be witnessing the first photo of a black hole and proof of Einsteins theory — and to be able to give credit to a girl is the cherry on top. On April 11th, 2019 media across the globe unveiled the image, which was created by combining the data from 8 telescopes stationed across the globe. The team was able to make out a circular ring of light in a far off galaxy called M87 (which is inside of the constellation Virgo). For years, scientists had been measuring massive energy coming from there. Finally, we were able to see a black hole which is “nearly 7 billion times the mass of the sun”. Apparently, there is a black hole in every galaxy. Scientists believe these are mostly made by stars imploding when they’ve run out of fuel. A black hole is created when a great amount of mass tries to fit into a small space. The object basically inverts on itself and creates a hole in space that sucks everything in which is to small or too slow to fight its gravitational pull.

IN MY OPINION: The most amazing part about this discovery, for me, is how it proves there is so much we don’t know. One of the questions that remains is what happens to things that go into the black hole – Do you go straight through the hole? To where? Or do you burst into flames in the ring of fire in its horizon? We have so much left to learn as a people. On a very spiritual level, this provides a tactical reference as to how big the universe actually is. The first Star Wars film was released in 1977, and we have just seen our first actual image 42 years later. The fact that Einstein’s mathematics have been proven right 104 years after his theory was proposed in 1915 is more amazing, still. Katie Bouman is only 29 years old and developed an algorithm that helped capture the image. She was integral in this entire mission & that simply proves how important we all are — people of all ages from all generation. This encourages me to be patient… we are all still learning. It takes time to build up the tools and the knowledge needed to see the unseeable and do the undoable. On behalf of all the nerds out there, “This is amazing”!