The First Ever Image Of A Black Hole | How they are formed

The First Ever Image Of A Black Hole

The first-ever image of a black hole is now revealed. it is taken by the event horizon telescope (EHT). the supermassive black hole pictured is at the center of Messier 87,

a massive elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. it is located 55 million light years from earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times larger than our sun. this is a huge achievement, not only because it confirms Eintsines general theory of relativity, but because it opens up the possibility for visual observation of a black hole immediate environment.

Do you know what are black holes and how do they form?

Most people think of a black hole as a voracious whirlpool in space, sucking down everything around it. But that’s not really true! A black hole is a place where gravity has gotten so strong that the escape velocity is faster than light. But what does that mean, exactly?

For the Earth, that velocity is about 11 kilometers per second (7 miles/second). But an object’s escape velocity depends on its gravity: more gravity means a higher escape velocity because the gravity will “hold onto” things more strongly.

The Sun has far more gravity than the Earth, so its escape velocity is much higher more than 600 km/s (380 miles/s). That’s 3000 times faster than a jet plane!


If you take an object and squeeze it down in size, or take an object and pile mass onto it, its gravity (and escape velocity) will go up. At some point, if you keep doing that, you’ll have an object with so much gravity that the escape velocity is faster than light. Since that’s the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, anything too close would get trapped forever. No light can escape, and it’s like a bottomless pit: a black hole.

How Black holes Are Formed

The most common way for a black hole to form is probably in a supernova, an exploding star. When a star with about 25 times the mass of the Sun ends its life, it explodes. 

The outer part of the star screams outward at high speed, but the inner part of the star, its core, collapses down. If there is enough mass, the gravity of the collapsing core will compress it so much that it can become a black hole. 

When it’s all over, the black hole will have a few times the mass of the Sun. This is called a “stellar-mass black hole”, what many astronomers think of as a “regular” black hole. But there are also monsters, called supermassive black holes. 

These lurk in the centers of galaxies, and are huge: they can be millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun! They probably formed at the same time as their parent galaxies, but exactly how is not known for sure. Perhaps each one started as a single huge star which exploded to create a black hole and then accumulated more material (including other black holes). 

Astronomers think there is a supermassive black hole in the center of nearly every large galaxy, including our own Milky Way. Stellar-mass black holes also form when two orbiting neutron stars, ultra-dense stellar cores left over from one kind of supernova merge to produce a short gamma-ray burst, a tremendous blast of energy detectable across the entire observable Universe. Gamma-ray bursts are in a sense the birth cries of black holes. Try these Astronomy gadgets:

Stay tuned for more interesting facts about astronomy!