At the EHT press conference on 10 April 2019, Doeleman, the director of the EHT, unveiled to the world, the first ever human photograph of a black hole. This black hole is located at the centre of the elliptical galaxy M87, 50 million light-years away from us. As the main black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy, it weighs as much as 6.5 billion suns.
The release of this black hole photo has been a bit of a thunderclap. Over forty countries and hundreds of units have come together to do one thing, spanning the entire planet for one imaging session. It is not very clear in today’s 4k and VR visual experience, and it is a little shrinking to condense data of 10pb or more into such a small frame.
Location of EHT member telescope
There are many of the most advanced radio telescopes in the world in EHT, and they have made many important astrophysics results in their independent observations. Now combine them as a whole, making the size of the telescope almost equal to the diameter of the earth. The resolution required to observe such a distant black hole is even higher than that of observing the hair on the moon on Earth! At the same time, because of the huge amount of data obtained, there are two teams in the United States and Germany in the EHT organization. Using mathematical and physical models, they spent more than two years independently analyzing the data and comparing them to each other. A consistent black hole image.
As soon as the black hole photo came out, it ushered in an online carnival
But as the saying goes, the layman sees the action, the insider sees the doorway. Many things that look high and mighty to those in the industry are often shown to give the eating public a feeling of being nothing more than that. Nature’s creator is amazing. Many times the hard work of scientists can hardly imitate one of them. The 10Pb+ data obtained is not all optical information, and this photo is clearly more promotional than scientific. But what is more useful is the amount of data behind it, the comparison between the imaging results of what the black hole actually looks like and the theoretical model, which is far more useful than a “Photoshopped” photo. When Battle Angel Alita was released, there were comments that the Chinese tend to think that big spaceships, big universes and big explosions are special effects, and that simulated anthropomorphism does not count. Alita had nine million pixels in one eye, and they thought it might as well be real. This is a biased view, but it is not without merit. Avatar is nothing more than an outer space version of Pocahontas, and a live actor in a blue suit might not be able to pull it off. But the new visual experience he brings, with motion capture, 3D effects and so on, opens up a new market for cinema.
One hundred years ago, in 1919, Eddington’s expedition to West Africa to observe a total solar eclipse verified Einstein’s prediction that mass could indeed bend space-time.
Fifty-two years ago, in 1967, Wheeler first coined the term “black hole” to refer to an extremely dense object that exists only in theory and bends space-time infinitely.
Forty years ago, in 1979, the French astronomer Jean-Pierre Lumière used a transistor computer with one ten-thousandth the computing power of a mainstream mobile phone (the Fruit 4, for example) to calculate a contour map of light intensity, and then drew the image on a piece of photographic paper with his own hands, using a single ink dot, as indicated by the contour map.
This is also the first human simulation of a black hole obtained using numerical computer simulations
The impressive Vagantua from Star Trek.
Star Trek lies in the wake of the hard sci-fi dispute that has engulfed Wandering Earth since its release. Despite having 2017 Nobel Prize winner Kip Thorne as a scientific advisor, the film’s director opted for the top-down symmetrical drawing above, considering the audience’s understanding and acceptance. A pity, it has to be said.
Although our theories and arithmetic have been able to project what a black hole looks like, he is there, so why can’t we have a look?
Fortunately, thanks to the combined efforts of scientists around the world, in 2019 we were blessed with the first photograph of a black hole. Back then blurry black and white photos didn’t look as good and clear as oil paintings back then either, but that was, after all, a more advanced technology with better potential. Today, despite being a 240P projection on a 50” LCD TV with full loss picture quality, it is at least a real electromagnetic signal compared to what it was before.
Einstein was right aga-ga-gain!
While the revalidation of relativity is exciting, it also gives rise to a sense of powerlessness about the development of the theory today. Relativity and quantum mechanics each hold true in their respective spheres of application, but there are some apparent conflicts outside the field. It suggests that both theories are merely approximations of a more advanced theory. Just as Newtonian mechanics is a low-velocity approximation to relativity and a macroscopic approximation to quantum mechanics. However, our observations so far - verified by total solar eclipses, photographs of black holes from the near motion of Mercury to the end - have still failed to reveal the errors - or mistakes - of relativity. Theory guides practice, and practice reacts to theory. Mistakes in scientific research are not terrible; sometimes mistakes mean a way forward. But unfortunately, we still have not found a breakthrough in the next level of theory.
But before the explosion of knowledge about black holes, the public’s attention was drawn to the intellectual property case of “Vision China”, which is a laughable digression.
