Yesterday was a great breakthrough in science. Because yesterday the first ever image of a black hole was published to the public. Yes! The image of a black hole. A black hole is a massive object in space. Massive? Yes, though the size of it is massive, the mass contained in it is also unbelievably huge. A black hole is more or less a spherical hole in space that can suck almost anything out there in space. Even light passing nearby it will be pulled in. The gravity of it is immense, it is more than the speed of light itself, so even light can’t escape from its pull. This is similar to a water falls. The water flowing inside a water falls can’t return back, similarly the light flowing inside a black hole can’t return back. Another weird state of a black hole is, it warps the space-time fabric so much that if you are going near it the time would stop, your watch would stop ticking.

Since light can’t escape, the image of the black hole should definitely be black. Till a day before yesterday no one has ever taken a photo of a black hole. Now comes the question ‘where do we find them in space?’. We have 100 billion galaxies in space. Every galaxy’s central point is a black hole, including our Milky way galaxy. We all together at this point of time with our sun and other planets are revolving around a black hole.

Another jaw dropping fact about a black hole is, anything around you could be converted into a black hole. Every object around us have a particular imaginary radius around them called the Schwarzchild radius. If we could compress all the matter of an object within this radius, it will become a black hole. Even moon can be converted into a black hole. The moon’s Schwarzchild radius is 0.109126 mm. If all the mass of our moon can be converted into this region, it will become a black hole. Now this black hole will be less than the size of a water droplet. But this black hole converted moon will still have the same tidal effects on earth.

Now we are pretty much clear that we could not photography a black hole. But our scientists are way cooler than anyone. They have been trying to picture it for the past several years. Recently with the collaboration of several countries, scientists together have formed a project called “The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to image a super massive black hole. Finally, the image is out to public. The image on the right is the original image of the black hole. The image on the left is the artistic rendition of a random black hole. This black hole was found in a galaxy called M87. This black hole is 500 million trillion Kms away from earth and was photographed by a network of 8 telescopes across the globe. The mass of this black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. One could see the bright spots of light around it in that image. This is due to the super heated gas clouds which are been pulled into the hole. Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence. This image is one of the keys in learning the behaviour of these massive giants.

This black hole is very far away from us. This means that we are seeing a very old image. That means probably earth was just forming at the time this looked same as that in the image. This image shows how small we are in this universe. Earth is just a lonely speck of dust in space. But we humans here on earth fight and kill each other in the name of religion, caste and creed. All these blood sheds in the name of war were for a momentary leadership in that tiny part of dust floating in outer space. One could see how high is human stupidity. For now, earth is the only place to harbor life in the universe. It is our duty to preserve the flora and fauna, love each other and lead a happy life in this tiny spot floating in the vast spread outer space.