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This year, we’ll look directly into the abyss
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Every picture anyone has ever seen of a black hole has been a depiction, an artist rendering of what we think these giants will look like. Until now, the closest we’ve come to directly sighting a black hole is by observing the effects they have on objects around them — causing stars to orbit at the center of our galaxy, spewing out powerful jets, and devouring interstellar matter during accretion. Material crossing the infamous event horizon leaves a certain glow. We can’t see this with our eyes alone but the friction causes the material to heat up by millions of degrees, making it possible to detect through x-rays and leaving a cloud of particles bigger than entire galaxies. Black holes also have a foundation in physics where they’re predicted to exist by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, Einstein himself doubted whether or not they could be real.
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This year was also the first time we’ve witnessed a black hole ripping apart a star two times the size of our own sun, resulting in a blast captured by telescopes watching Arp 299 — two colliding galaxies. When materials are swept into a black hole from a star, they create an accretion disk. The disk forms at the hole’s equator but light bent upward through gravity causes there to appear to be two bright, raging disks, as seen in the depiction of Gargantua from Interstellar.
When the image is released later this year, it will be an important moment in the history of mankind. Not only as space explorers, but as a species capable of innovation and foresight, having predicted these interstellar giants over a century before we can finally see them ourselves for the very first time.
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