人类历史上的第一张黑洞照片

何其幸运，从此刻起，我们成为史上第一代“看见”黑洞的人！

 

它和你想象的一样吗？是像一面燃烧的火墙、张开血盆大口的黑暗怪兽，还是和《星际穿越》中的卡冈图雅黑洞一样，有着深不见底的黑色中心？

 

This is what a black hole looks like.

这就是黑洞的样子。

 

 

 

A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole.

一个名为“视界望远镜”(Event Horizon Telescope)的全球望远镜网络放大了M87星系中这个超大质量的怪物，创造了有史以来第一张黑洞图片。

 

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said April 10 in Washington, D.C., at one of seven concurrent news conferences. The results were also published in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“我们看到了我们认为看不到的东西。我们已经看到并拍下了黑洞的照片。”位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的哈佛 - 史密森天体物理学中心的EHT主任兼天体物理学家Sheperd Doeleman于4月10日在华盛顿特区举行的7个新闻发布会之一上说。这一重大结果也以特刊的形式通过六篇论文发表在《天体物理学杂志通信》上。

 

“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Seeing one “is a Herculean task,” she said.

美国国家科学基金会的主任弗朗西丝·科尔多瓦(France Cordova)在华盛顿特区新闻发布会上说:“我们一直在研究黑洞，有时很容易忘记，我们都没有人真正看过黑洞。她还说，“能看到一个黑洞‘是一项艰巨的任务’”。

 

The target was an enormous black hole, 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun, in the core of M-87, a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light years away in the constellation Virgo. A familiar target for amateur astronomers, M-87 is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky, featuring a huge jet of material extending away from the core, powered by the voracious black hole. The black hole’s six-and-a-half billion solar masses are crammed into a region about the size of a solar system.

目标是一个巨大的黑洞，其质量是太阳的65亿倍，位于M-87星系的中心，这是一个巨大的椭圆星系，距离室女座约5500万光年。作为业余天文学家熟悉的目标，M-87是天空中最明亮的射电源之一，其特点是由贪婪的黑洞提供动力，有一个巨大的物质射流从核心向外延伸。黑洞的六十五亿个太阳质量挤在一个大小与太阳系相当的区域。

 

“We now have visual evidence for a black hole,” Doeleman said. “We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M-87. This is the strongest evidence we have to date for the existence of black holes. It is also consistent ... with Einstein’s predictions.”

“我们现在有了黑洞存在的视觉证据，”Doeleman说。“我们现在知道，在M-87星系中心存在一个质量是太阳65亿倍的黑洞。这是迄今为止我们所掌握的关于黑洞存在的最有力的证据。这也是一致的……与爱因斯坦的预测。”

 

Daniel Marrone, an astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory said: “Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test. ... The object at the heart of M-87 is a black hole like those described by general relativity.”

亚利桑那大学斯图尔德天文台的天文学家丹尼尔·马隆说:“今天，广义相对论通过了另一个关键的测试。M-87的核心是一个黑洞，就像广义相对论描述的那样。”

 

The accepted reality of black holes is relatively new, but the concept is not. John Mitchell, an English country parson and accomplished scientist, first suggested the possibility of “dark stars” in 1783.

黑洞的公认事实是相对较新的，但概念并非如此。约翰·米切尔，一位英国乡村牧师和杰出的科学家，在1783年首次提出了“暗星”存在的可能性。

 

 

 

Mitchell wondered what would happen if a star was so large, and its gravity so immense, that its escape velocity, that is, the speed an object - or a photon - would need to overcome the star’s gravitational field, exceeded the speed of light. He concluded the star would be invisible, or dark, because its light could not escape.

米切尔想知道，如果一颗恒星如此之大，它的重力如此之大，以至于它的逃逸速度，也就是一个物体或光子克服恒星引力场所需的速度，超过了光速，会发生什么。他的结论是，这颗恒星是看不见的，或者说黑暗的，因为它的光无法逃逸。

 

It was a remarkable application of Newton’s laws and while the modern concept of a black hole differs in many ways from Mitchell’s he had the right idea.

这是牛顿定律的杰出应用，尽管现代黑洞的概念在许多方面与米切尔的不同，但他的想法是正确的。

 

Einstein’s relativity equations predicted the inevitable existence of black holes in 1915, although the famous physicist initially did not believe such objects could be real. But in 1916, German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild calculated an exact solution to Einstein’s equations that showed how black holes could form.

1915年，爱因斯坦的相对论方程预言了黑洞不可避免的存在，尽管这位著名的物理学家最初并不相信这些物体是真实存在的。但是在1916年，德国天文学家卡尔·史瓦西计算出了爱因斯坦方程的一个精确解，这个解显示了黑洞是如何形成的。

 

Luckily, stars like the sun are too small to ever become black holes. But much more massive stars face that dark fate.

幸运的是，像太阳这样的恒星太小了，永远不会形成黑洞。但是更多的大质量恒星面临着那种黑暗的命运。