van der Marel (Space Telescope Science Institute), Science Credit: NASA, ESA, C.-P. Light from background stars is stretched and smeared as the stars skim by the black hole. The black hole's powerful gravity distorts space around it like a funhouse mirror. The black region in the center represents the black hole's event horizon, where no light can escape the massive object's gravitational grip. But in many ways, the true value of the project lies in how it created an opportunity for researchers to change the way they explore the world as individuals and enabled them to work together to find the unlimited possibility of collaboration.Įnjoyed this video about the search to uncover what is inside a black hole? Subscribe to Freethink for more interesting news on the latest scientific discoveries.This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. More Than a 5-Petabyte Imageīlack holes represent a moment when our universe ends and folds back upon itself – literally a margin of spacetime – where relativity and quantum physics collide, where our models and theories all break in their own single understanding.īack here on earth, black holes do something similar – they bring people together from different disciplines to create collisions of thought.Ĭross-disciplinary dialogue isn’t always easy, but the Black Hole Initiative has led to a number of collaborations – not the least of these is the image itself.Ĭreating the first black hole image was an important milestone. However this time, scientists and researchers had to make sure there was no bias in their computer’s algorithms that would skew the collected data to fulfill expectations of what black holes should look like. We can still infer the melody because we understand music. The data collected from the Event Horizon Telescope is often referred to as a song played on a piano with missing keys. Rendering the final image took more collaboration – this time, between humans and computers.

The now-famous image was created by the Event Horizon Telescope – a group of eight radio observatories across our planet that collected radio waves for understanding the black hole’s structure.Īfter its collection, 5 petabytes of data, the information was physically transported to central locations – MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. The first image of black hole M87 was a milestone in many ways. Black holes may hold the secret to reconciling these two theories and creating a unified understanding of physics. But according to general relativity, black holes create a singularity – a point in spacetime with infinite density that is completely inescapable.Īnd according to quantum mechanics, that’s impossible. By and large, these theories don’t conflict with each other. Modern physics is dominated by two major theories – general relativity and quantum mechanics. Black Holes Bring Together Brilliant Minds Join us as we sit down with Avi Loeb, Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy and one of the founders of the Black Hole Initiative, to learn everything we know about black holes. This interdisciplinary approach forces the brightest minds in cosmology to re-examine all of their assumptions. It also requires philosophers and people who can bring a fresh perspective to these challenges – people who can push researchers to think differently. Black holes are literally a place where the fabric of spacetime is bent to the point of breaking, and they also break our models of how the universe works.īecause black holes are the absolute boundary between what we know and what we don’t, this is a problem that cannot be solved by astronomers, physicists, or mathematicians alone.

There’s no center to the universe, but there are edges.

A black hole