BY TAIWO FAROTIMI
Scientists have stumbled on a mysterious lake of fire. The lake is one of the black hole discoveries recorded over the years by astronomers. The difference is that this one is bigger in size even as it presents a clearer picture of some of the mysterious things that exist within the universe. The big black hole is said to be of a distance of 500 million trillion kilometers away from planet Earth.
Now the estimated size of the black hole is scary. According to the scientists, in a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC on Wednesday, has a measurement of 40 billion kilometer across three million times the size of planet Earth. Little wonder that the scientists described it a monster. Professor Heino Falcke of Radboud University, Netherlands is quoted as saying that the hole has “a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.” He also described it as one of the “heaviest champion of black holes in the Universe.” The real circular dark hole is surrounded by a bright “ring of fire” serviced by a superheated gas, which falls into the hole proper.
It may not be the first time that astronomers were getting lucky capturing black holes, but this time the telescopes recorded for them the first, a historic one at that, photo of black hole. It was distinct enough to afford them the opportunity to see the fire surrounding the circular hole and the source through the fire is fed with gas. The brightness, they say, made it also possible for them to capture the image in spite of the distance from the Earth.
This discovery is really not a happenstance, scientists have since 18th century been into researches to explain some invisible ‘dark stars’, but have not been lucky enough to record a clear image. Frederick Gueth, an astronomer at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS is quoted as saying that ‘It’s a distance we could have barely imagined.’ But for its size, the black would have been difficult to pick even by the telescope, because by the account of Astropysical Journal Letters the exercise would have amounted to ‘photographing a pebble on the Moon.’
In fact, CNRS’ astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet and 1979 author of the first digital simulation of a black hole said, ‘I never thought that I would see a real one in my lifetime.’
Though the photo was published Wednesday, the journey to this epoch event started over years of little gains and near disappointments. For instance, when all hopes were raised from some rigorous efforts in 2017, all the scientists got was what one of them described as a ‘hell of a Christmas present’. That was what they got on December 23, 2017. But then the teams, four in all, had another year to piece the data into an image.
They did not stop at that. They did the work, according to Gueth, ‘four times with four different teams.’ That was because they wanted to present a fool-proof report. The result from each team confirmed what the others got. Thus the image of the dark black hole in a red hot fire.