DID WE ACTUALLY JUST SEE A BLACK HOLE?

Quite simply, no.

Daily, our world advances technologically and our most recent developments have allowed us to actually see a black hole. Or have they?

In around 1783, John Michell showed that according to Newton’s Law of Gravity, such objects (black holes) can exist. Later on during the 1930s, scientists, using Einstein’s more complex theory of gravity, commonly known as General Relativity, showed that stars could collapse under their own gravity at the end of their life creating a black hole. 

Michell also theorised the fact that although these black holes remain unseen, they may reveal themselves if they are being orbited around by a star. Interestingly, in the early 1970s, two astronomers, Louise Webster and Paul Murdin and a student Thomas Bolton managed to prove Michell’s second major claim, which was that objects such as black holes can reveal themselves if they have a star in orbit about them. Webster, Murdin and Bolton announced the discovery of a massive (but invisible object) in orbit about a blue star really far away (6,000 light years away), which is now regarded as the first discovered black hole, codenamed Cygnus X-1.

We see that theories of black holes have always existed, with some scientists being able to prove the existence of black holes using radiation detectors and telescopes. Recently though, interesting images have emerged, which, up to a certain extent, are of a black hole. They reveal images of a black hole in the centre of the Messier 87, a massive galaxy. The hole resides some 55million light years away from Earth and has an immense mass of 6.5 billion times that of our Sun.

However, what we see is not a black hole, at least not in its entirety. In order to comprehend why, we need to understand is that a black hole is a region of space that has such a strong gravitational field that no matter or radiation can escape. Therefore, based upon that definition nothing should be able to escape from that region, black hole is basically a region from which nothing can escape, not even light, so it should practically be impossible to see the black hole itself.

Which then perplexes us even further. If it is not a black hole that we see, what do we see?

What we see is a golden ring around the darkness called the Event Horizon, which is the mom

ent an object approaching the black hole reaches a point of no return, the black hole itself, still remains unseen. Scientists captured those pictures using the EHT (Even Horizon Telescope) Project.

In the middle of the Event Horizon is something called Singularity, which is located at the very centre of the black hole. It is where matter has collapsed into a region of infinite density. Everything that is sucked into the hole ends up here.