Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first image ever made of a black hole.

 

科学家周三公布了首张黑洞照片。
 

 

Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers¹ created the picture showing the violent neighborhood around a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades.

 

It looked like a flaming orange, yellow and black ring.

 

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is," said Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard.

 

Jessica Dempsey, a co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory² in Hawaii, said it reminded her of the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

 

Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed³ stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated⁴ at the center of most galaxies⁵, including ours, they are so dense⁶ that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This one's "event horizon" - the point of no return around it, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the abyss - is as big as our entire solar system.

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