The M87 blackhole and why it is not a discovery.

A Human Collaboration

Collaborating from all over the world, several telescopes working altogether, from the United States and Germany to China and Japan, this is indeed a human collaboration, a scientific community coming together, driven by their curiosity and knowledge to uncover the true form of a black hole, and a true form they obtained, a black hole has finally been seen. It took several months of precision and data, and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration deserve a huge round of applause. It is not easy, they had to combine data from several telescopes around Earth, and they had to make sure each and every telescope is looking at the same event. Simply put, they are combining the efforts of 7 telescopes positioned on Earth into one big telescope, strong enough to give us an image of an object almost 50 million light-years ( Mly) away from us. The black hole seen is called M87 and is approximately 40 billion kilometers in diameter. That is 40,000 times the size of our sun! But despite that gigantic size, looking at it from 50 Mly away, it’s basically like trying to read a newspaper in Paris from New York City. Yes the image is not full 4K, but you have got to give it to them, that is pretty amazing, and again, hats off to the EHT collaboration.

Why It Is NOT a Discovery

On April 10th 2019 , the first ever image of the black hole M87 was showed during a conference held by the EHT collaboration, a conference that was anticipated by thousands of scientists, students and enthusiasts around the world.

The news spread like wild fire, topping every news channel and social media, the image was a top sensation, being liked and shared over millions of times over Facebook, Twitter, and even 9gag ! Yes, the image also made it to become a meme, M87 has become a world superstar, more like a world super black hole.

And with everyone trying to write about it and make the headlines, someone had to mess up, someone had to blabber false information for the sake of sharing the joy, and get some extra clicks. #clickbaitwebsites #sciencewebsites.

” It’s the greatest human achievement since man’s landing on the moon ! “

“ We’re looking at a black hole for the first time ! “

“It’s the discovery of the century ! “

Each of these sentences are very much inaccurate. First thing I want to clear out that we are not looking at the black hole the same way we would see it if we were to stand next to it. Forget the fact that you’ll get spaghettified if you were to stand next to a black hole and die. But if you could actually look at it with your own eyes, that’s not what you will see, not the picture we’re looking it, that is because the picture is a radio wavelength image, meaning it is captured using photons that are in the radio wavelength section, a section of the light spectrum that our eyes cannot see. We see visible light, everything around you from the device in front of you to the skies and stars above you are in the visible light range, that’s only a small percentage of what is around us. Microwaves, Ultraviolet light, Radio waves, X-rays and much more are invisible to the naked eye. So how are you seeing this image ? The telescopes capture these radio wave photons, and build an image out of them, where the black part of the picture means that there are no photons coming from that spot, and the reddish part shows us an intensity of the photon’s energy, some thing like a heat map. But actually there is nothing red, it’s just a computer simulation that relates intensity of the region to redness. I could’ve built another code which relates the intensity to blueness, and the image would have showed a blueish color rather than the red one. It’s just a way to visualize it.

Now whether you want to consider it THE greatest achievement or not, well that’s up to you, a lot of work and effort was put into it, I do not deny that, but so did the LIGO team for the gravitational waves observation back in 2016 , and I personally find LIGO’s work to be a greater achievement than this one. I don’t want to compare here, although I just did, but LIGO’s achievement was indeed a discovery, in a literal sense, it was the first time ever someone gave us an evidence that gravitational waves exist.

Now let’s look at the black hole case, is it truly a discovery ?
I find that the whole thing has been extremely over-hyped, as I do not consider it a discovery, just an extra proof that black holes are there, after all we’ve been studying the orbits of stars around these objects, all of which satisfy Einstein’s field equations that tell us that the only case for a star to orbit in such a manner around that object is if that object were to be a black hole. There are several experiments that has been done which shows that black holes exists. Bending of light, gravitational lensing, even the gravitational waves (GW) detected were from black holes merging together, so how could it be that the GW detected is a discovery, if what cause them wasn’t a discovery at that time ? So we knew these objects cannot but be black holes !
“If something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it has to be a duck” (with enough evidence which scientists had already)
The argument should go something like this. What is a discovery ? Is seeing something means a discovery ? We see a lot of things everyday, that doesn’t mean we have “discovered” what that thing is, scientifically at least, you need to understand it first, its working and mechanism, which is already done in the case of black holes.
Secondly, from the other side of the story, can we discover something even if we’ve never seen it ? I believe so yes, we’ve never seen electrons, quarks, gravity, or even energy itself ! does that mean we can never discover it ? We know it’s there, this is just logical, and by logical here I mean we follow rules of mathematics and numbers which can never be wrong, and perform experiments and do observations to see if the outside world fits the equations we’ve built. That is what we do in physics, it is basically filling the puzzle. If 1+x=2, then x has to be 1. If you’ve seen a mother walking along side her biological daughter, it is logically straightforward to “discover”the existence of a father. ( Not the best of examples perhaps.)

In physics we start we start with a lot of assumptions, and start narrowing down our options until the right piece fits perfectly. Let’s take the case of gravity, a very elusive case. Newton has set its laws which worked for centuries up to some point. Newton found a piece of the puzzle, he knew something was there and he called it gravity. At the same time, other people like Maxwell were working on other fields of physics known as Electromagnetism. At the point, imagine physics as a map, Gravity being let’s say Asia, while Electromagnetism is the Americas, and something exists in between which we do not know. A lot of assumptions and imagination were put in place to try and fill up the remaining continents and connect the map together, that’s how actual maps were built, there were hundreds of false maps throughout history. One of the false piece in our physics map that was put was called “Ether”, a way trying to explain how light travels in space. But that was proven to be the wrong piece, in fact, it’s not a piece at all. The correct piece was Einstein’s theory of Relativity, since it did connect Electromagnetism and Gravity together.
Whether Einstein’s theory is the whole piece of this puzzle or not, it is correct up to some extent the same way Newton’s theory is. But it is unlikely that Einstein’s theory of gravity is the full piece, there’s more to the story for sure, with the so called Dark Matter, a very long chapter of expeditions have been going, but that’s another story which I have also written about. ( Dark Matter vs. Mond: A Tug of War )

So what I am trying to say here is that gravity is a puzzle, we know it’s there, we’re just facing troubles to understand it fully and make it fit with other observational data. Same with black holes, we know they are there, data has shown it, the same way Newton used data of planetary orbits around the sun to formulate gravity. So if you were never convinced that black holes indeed existed until now, then good luck convincing yourself that gravity is there, just make sure you hold a grip onto something in case you suddenly felt like floating.

Whether you can see it or not that’s something subjective, and truth is not subjective.