NEW YORK ¨C Albert Einstein would have been pleased, but maybe also a bit surprised, by this week¡¯s release of the first ever close-up image of a supermassive black hole. Early speculation about black holes fell straight from Einstein¡¯s 1915 theory of general relativity, but the great scientist himself thought the idea was a little too weird to manifest itself in the actual universe.
He assumed it was an artifact of the mathematics, said physicist Daniel Kennefick, co-author of ¡°An Einstein Encyclopedia¡± and the upcoming ¡°No Shadow of Doubt.¡± In correspondence with French physicists in the 1920s, Einstein dismissed the idea that something could collapse forever, reaching a point of infinite density and trapping even light. (They didn¡¯t use the term black hole, which didn¡¯t catch on until the 1960s.)
Kennefick said it required scientists to get over a few mental barriers to recognize that real black holes lurk out there, including the monstrosity in the new image, with an estimated mass equivalent to 6 billion suns. The doughnut-shaped glow of the image was not the actual black hole but delineated a kind of shadow of the region known as the event horizon, inside of which even light can¡¯t escape. The event horizon is about as wide as our solar system, but the mass of all those suns may be packed inside of a speck.
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