Hubble Confirms Existence of Huge Black Hole

The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed for the first time the existence of a supermassive black hole, ending a decades-long quest for definitive proof, astronomers announced Wednesday.

The orbiting observatory, with corrective lenses installed during a repair mission in December, was able to see clearly for the first time into the heart of the giant galaxy M87, more than 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, where astronomers have long suspected that a monstrous black hole was lurking.

The telescope revealed the details so sharply that the observing team was able to “weigh” the object at the galaxy’s center with unexpected ease, the astronomers said. The key was a pancake-shaped disc of hot gas spinning around, and being consumed, by something at the center. Measurements of its velocity showed that the central object has a mass 2 billion to 3 billion times the mass of the sun, compressed into an area about the size of our solar system.

“If that isn’t a black hole, I don’t know what it is,” said Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He and Richard Harms of Applied Research Corp. in Landover, Md., led the observing team and announced the findings Wednesday at National Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters.

The concept of a black hole was built, at first, purely on mathematical equations and imaginings of theorists. They envisioned a massive, collapsing object (a star or group of stars) whose gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing--not even light--can come out again after it has crossed the hole’s threshold, known as the “event horizon.” Within this singular object, normal time and space come to a halt. The known laws of physics do not apply.

The immense gravity of the black hole draws all nearby objects and material toward it, forming a whirlpool (called an “accretion disc”) that resembles water going down a bathtub drain. In this maelstrom, matter crowds in, collides, heats up and forms what Hubble saw as a pancake of gas around the hole, with high-speed jets of gas spewing from the disc near one or both poles of the hole.

In recent years, increasingly sophisticated instruments gradually have piled up convincing evidence that these objects exist. But, Ford said, “skeptical colleagues were always clever enough to create computer models showing that some other explanation was possible.”

Now, said Bruce Margon of the University of Washington, “we no longer have an alternative theory.”

“All reasonable astronomers will be convinced” said NASA astronomer Stephen Maran of the Goddard Space Flight Center, who is also a spokesman for the American Astronomical Society.

The “smoking gun” proof presented Wednesday was the measurement of the astounding velocity in the whirling disc of gas as it was sucked inward by the powerful gravity of the hole: At a distance of 60 light-years from the center, it was whipping around at 1.2 million m.p.h. (A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles.)

“Once you get that measurement, all you need is straightforward Newtonian physics to calculate the mass of the central object that’s making the disc spin,” Harms said. In a similar way, astronomers have measured the motion of the planets to determine the sun’s mass.

M87 is a giant football-shaped collection of up to a trillion stars. It has fascinated astronomers since early in the century, when they detected a jet of hot ionized gas at least 4,000 light-years long shooting from its core. Such a jet is now thought to be one signature of a black hole. The new observations show that the disc of whirling gas is positioned at a right angle to the jet, just as predicted.

Theorist Edwin E. Salpeter of Cornell University, after seeing the new Hubble data, said: “A black hole is now the least crazy model for what we’re seeing.” Thirty years ago, Salpeter and a Russian astronomer independently wrote papers essentially predicting Wednesday’s findings. “It’s good to finally win the bet,” he added.

Recent observations indicate that black holes may come in a variety of sizes and may lie at the cores of many galaxies, including Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way.

In fact, recent observations indicate that these powerhouses may be commonplace in the universe, existing in all sizes and throughout time.