Editorial | Black hole image a revolutionary glimpse

While the Earthrise photograph allowed humanity to stare back at itself and its planetary home, the new black hole image lets us look at the mystery of cosmic creation and destruction

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A handout photo provided by the European Southern Observatory shows the first photograph of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:43pm, 13 Apr 2019Updated: 11:42pm, 13 Apr 2019

Images of outer space and the universe have always inspired awe and wonder. Astronomers have now presented the world with the first image of a black hole. While Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has long predicted the possibility of those mysterious entities and recent discoveries have confirmed their existence and abundance across the universe, there is nothing like being shown a physical image of one.

In the years to come, its impact may be compared with Earthrise, the photo of our blue planet taken by US astronauts that became one of the 20th century’s defining moments. With Earthrise, humanity stared back at itself and its planetary home for the first time. With the new black hole image, we are looking at the mystery of cosmic creation and destruction itself. The image is not really a photograph, but the outcome of an unprecedented massive processing of data collected from a network of the world’s most powerful telescopes, a cooperative effort by an international team of scientists including ones from Shanghai and Taipei. It shows the black hole with its accretion disc, or swirling masses of matter that spiral inward.

The supermassive black hole in question is at the centre of the galaxy M87, which is about 55 million light years away and 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. We don’t know what’s inside a black hole. Its gravitational pull is so great that nothing escapes it, including light, hence its description as “black”. It is not completely “black”, though. As matter is being sucked in, it emits what is called Hawking radiation, a quantum phenomenon named after the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

Some mathematical solutions using Einstein’s theory have predicted wormholes, or possible gateways to another dimension or universe. But they are, at the moment, only speculation. Closer to empirical science, many astronomers believe that far from being destroyers, black holes play a key role in creating galaxies and maintaining their stability. At the cutting edge of contemporary research, many believe the next revolution is to be made in a field called quantum gravity, which promises to merge quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory. For all their mystery, black holes may turn out to be the kind of objects in nature that will help scientists achieve that revolutionary understanding.