What Is #20: A Black Hole?

The 'What Is' Series

A couple of months ago I started a new series on this blog titled "What Is". Thus far the focus is on the field of astronomy where we hear all sorts of cool science taking place in space. The goal of this series is to explain the details of different objects we hear about relatively frequently.

A Black Hole

If you paid any attention at all to the news last month, you certainly heard about the first ever image of a black hole. Super cool! And here's that picture:

Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration - https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1907a/

This is the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, about 55 million light years from us. Again, super cool! If you haven't yet seen this video clip of Dr. Katie Bouman, one of many who worked on this, but the one who lead the team that developed the algorithm to analyze the data and produce this image, you need to see it.

Dr. Katie Bouman

Her excitement in this clip goes to show that astronomy is an exciting field that brings us something new every day! Again, awesome science in action!!!

So what is a black hole? Well, a black hole is an object whose mass is so condensed that it is packed into an infinitely small space. Gravity is so large that not even light can escape, hence the name, black holes We've known about black holes for decades and know where many are at based on the motion of stars and other objects around them, but this image is the first ever direct image of a black hole!

There's much more to black holes, such as the event horizon, spaghettification, warping of space, etc., but I'm going to save those for future posts in this What Is series. You'll just have to keep reading this blog! For now though, take another look at the image above and view the video clip of Dr. Katie Bouman talking about this discovery! Then go out and do some science!!!