If We Can’t See Black Holes, How Do We Know They Really Exist?

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We may not be able to see black holes like we can other tangible objects, but we can still experience the immense power of their gravity. It’s not a big surprise to hear that no astronomer has ever viewed a black hole through a telescope. We’ve never seen the event horizon that surrounds a black hole either, but again, we know for sure it’s there. This was proved last year when physicists heard gravitational waves that were made when two black holes collided. We can also see the effects that a black hole’s immense gravity has on objects nearby.


UCLA’s Galactic Center Group explains, “These orbits, and a simple application of Kepler’s Laws, provide the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 4 million times the mass of the Sun.” Although we can’t physically view black holes at the moment, that doesn’t mean to say that we never will. But for the moment, scientists can only speculate as to what the event horizon would look like. As well as revealing the event horizon, a true image would probably also show an accretion disk. This is essentially a bright ring of matter that circles the black hole. But, to get a picture is a whole different ball game explains Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, “Taking a picture of it would be equivalent to taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the moon.”


Here, actual images, collected over the past 16 years, have been assembled into a time-lapse video. The real motion of the stars has been accelerated by a factor 32 million. The individual images have been shifted and stretched to the same scale and orientation and cover the central part of the color image presented at the top of the main press release. Credit: Eso.org / R.Genzel and S. Gillessen 


So, although we may not be able to view black holes yet, it could be on the horizon. Over the next few years, scientists are planning to do more testing and hopefully be able to confirm black holes using a telescope. Later this year the Event Horizon Telescope is due to come online and is a global network of sensors that will hopefully display the first ever image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. So, watch this space!


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