"Gargantua"-The black hole that could swallow our solar system.

This past April, with an event that was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, the world viewed its first image of what had once been purely theoretical, a black hole at the heart of galaxy M87 the size of our solar system, and bigger, with the mass of six and a half billion suns that was captured by a lens the size of planet Earth and 4,000 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers have theorized that the galaxy that harbors the black hole grew to its massive size by merging with several other black holes in elliptical galaxy M87, the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe thought to have been formed by the merging of 100 or so smaller galaxies. The M87 black hole’s large size and relative proximity, led astronomers to think that it could be the first black hole that they could actually “see.”
The black hole that that we can now actually see is frozen in time it was 55 million years ago, because it’s so far away the light took that long to reach us. “Over those eons, we emerged on Earth along with our myths, differentiated cultures, ideologies, languages and varied beliefs,” says astrophysicist Janna Levin with Columbia University.
The Event Horizon Telescope that imaged the black hole is actually 10 telescopes, linked across four continents in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and Antarctica, and designed to scan the cosmos in radio waves. For a few days in April 2017, the observatories studied the skies in tandem, creating a gargantuan telescope nearly the size of the planet.
“A medium-sized galaxy fell through the center of M87, and as a consequence of the enormous gravitational tidal forces, its stars are now scattered over a region that is 100 times larger than the original galaxy!” said Ortwin Gerhard,  head of the dynamics group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.  Observations July 2018 with ESO’s Very Large Telescope revealed that the giant elliptical galaxy swallowed the entire medium-sized galaxy over the last billion years.

M87, imaged above by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, is home to the supermassive black hole that spews two jets of material out into space at nearly the speed of light. The inset shows a close-up view of the shockwaves created by the two jets. This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the entire M87 galaxy in infrared light.
Located about 55 million light-years from Earth, M87 has been a subject of astronomical study for more than 100 years and has been imaged by many NASA observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and NuSTAR.
In 1918, astronomer Heber Curtis first noticed “a curious straight ray” extending from the galaxy’s center. This bright jet of high-energy material, produced by a disk of material spinning rapidly around the black hole, is visible in multiple wavelengths of light, from radio waves through X-rays. When the particles in the jet impact the interstellar medium (the sparse material filling the space between stars in M87), they create a shockwave that radiates in infrared and radio wavelengths of light but not visible light. In the Spitzer image, the shockwave is more prominent than the jet itself.
This zoom video above starts with a view of the ALMA telescope array in Chile and zooms in on the heart of M87, showing successively more detailed observations and culminating in the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole’s silhouette. (ESO/L. Calçada, Digitized Sky Survey 2, ESA/Hubble, RadioAstron, De Gasperin et al., Kim et al., EHT Collaboration).
On the right is the first-ever image of the black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. The NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory’s wide-field view of the M87 galaxy (left) reveals the jet of high-energy particles launched by the intense gravitational and magnetic fields around the black hole. Credit: X-ray (left): NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen; Radio (right): Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
Harvard history of science professor peter L.Galison, a collaborator on Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), said that scientists proposed theoretical arguments for black holes as early as 1916. It was not until the 1970s, however, that researchers substantiated the theory by observing extremely dense areas of matter. Scientists announced in 2016 that, for the first time, they had detected gravitational waves — which many argued were produced by black holes merging, and therefore were evidence that black holes exist.
The image marked the culmination of years of work undertaken by a team of 200 scientists in 59 institutes across 18 countries. The project, to which other scientists at Harvard’s Black Hole Institute also contributed, drew on data collected by eight telescopes whose locations range from Hawaii to the South Pole.

 In contrast to M87’s monster, 1,500 times more massive than the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sag A* has four million times the mass of our sun, which means that it’s about 44 million kilometers across. That may sound like a big target, but for the telescope array on Earth some 26,000 light-years (or 245 trillion kilometers) away, it’s like trying to photograph a golf ball on the Moon.

“More than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the center of our galaxy,” Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency and an expert on black holes, AFP’s Marlowe Hood. It has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly—as fast as 20 years, compared to our Solar System’s journey, which takes about 230 million years to circle the center of the Milky Way.
“We are sitting in the plain of our galaxy—you have to look through all the stars and dust to get to the center,” said McNamara.