CURRENT AFFAIRS

Detailed explanation-1: -It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the “event horizon”, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape.

Detailed explanation-2: -Following six years of meticulous observations, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has, for the first time ever, provided direct evidence for a lone black hole drifting through interstellar space by a precise mass measurement of the phantom object.

Detailed explanation-3: -The actual term “black hole” wasn’t coined until six decades later by astrophysicist John Wheeler. In the early 1970s, the first black-hole candidate, Cygnus X-1, was discovered in X-rays coming from superheated material swirling around a black hole orbiting a normal star.

Detailed explanation-4: -Chandrasekhar left England (where all doors were closed to him in view of the above) and migrated to the USA to become one of the most influential and respected astrophysicists in the world. His results came to be universally accepted and he won the Nobel Prize in 1983, over 50 years after his great discovery.

Detailed explanation-5: -Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of virtually all large galaxies, even our own Milky Way. Astronomers can detect them by watching for their effects on nearby stars and gas. This chart shows the relative masses of super-dense cosmic objects.