We look up in the sky and see, with naked eye or with telescopes, planets, stars, nebulaes and whole galaxies.
What no man has ever seen is black holes. We know that they exist. Black holes are formed when a massive star dies in a Supernova, all its mass being collapsed in the singularity point. For more information about black holes read our post we wrote about them:
https://spacelearningweb.com/2018/02/27/black-holes/
https://spacelearningweb.com/2018/03/08/blackholes2/
The potos or movies with scenes of black holes we see on the internet are just artists view and these arn’t actually true images!
NASA has in plan for more years taking the picture of the Sagetarius A, the supermassive black hole that is in the center of the Wilky Way thousends of ly away, with the “Event Horizon Telescope”.
It’s not one Telescope, but many of them throughout the planet, that use radio waves, and not visual waves!
But how can NASA see the images, if the telescopes don’t retrieve visual data?
Last year, NASA pointed the telescope to the Sagittarius A* black hole, but doesn’t that mean they already took the photo?
No! It’s a hard process named Interferometry!
NASA took the radio lots and lots of radio information that comes from the black hole and here comes the harder part. NASA scientists must merge all the data from the telescopes together and images are formed. This is what NASA is doing right now: They are taking the enough data and then they will transform it into a picture!
With a little luck, we could take the first ever picture of a black hole later this year, in 2018!
Space Learning Web 