And that, of course, helps verify general relativity,” says Clifford Will. The picture is “one more strong piece of evidence supporting the existence of black holes. That theory predicts how spacetime is warped by the extreme mass of a black hole. The new image aligns with what physicists expected a black hole to look like based on the theory of general relativity by Albert Einstein. “It really brings home how fortunate we are as a species at this particular time, with the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the universe, to have built all the science and technology to make it happen.” Einstein was right This astrophysicist at Yale University, in New Haven, Conn., is not on the EHT team. The much-anticipated big reveal of the image “lives up to the hype, that’s for sure,” says Priyamvada Natarajan. “It was just astonishment and wonder… to know that you’ve uncovered a part of the universe that was off limits to us.” “It’s been such a buildup,” Doeleman said. It unveils for the first time the dark abyss of one of the universe’s most mysterious objects. The EHT image reveals the shadow of M87’s black hole on its accretion disk. That disk looks like a fuzzy, asymmetrical ring. They gather bright disks of gas and other material that surrounds the black hole. But some black holes, especially supermassive ones dwelling in galaxies’ centers, stand out. Their gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape across the boundary at a black hole’s edge. That’s because black holes are famously hard to see. Chris Mihos/Case Western Reserve Univ., ESO
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