Answer:
Option A
Explanation:
"Curtis made his discovery near the end of the 1910s, a decade that had been rife with theoretical explosions about the nature of the universe. Most prominent among these was Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provided unified theories on the nature of space and time. Within this theory were 10 field equations, which Einstein used to develop theories about the geometric nature of spacetime. A physicist named Karl Schwarzschild used these theories to develop the concept of gravitational collapse in space. Einstein himself considered the concept of black holes too bizarre to explore further. He was wrong.
Curtis didn't know this at the time, but he was witnessing the light emanating from a black hole's accretion disk at the center of Messier 87, more commonly known as M87. The galaxy is located in the Virgo constellation is approximately 53 million light-years from Earth.
The black hole's name, Pōwehi, is Hawaiian in origin and translates to "embellished dark source of unending creation." It stems from a Hawaiian chant known as the Kumulipo which describes the creation of the Hawaiian universe.
How'd They Get The Picture?
The road to this image started a decade ago. In 2009, it was becoming increasingly clear that an interconnected team of telescopes could grab a direct image of a black hole.
No single telescope on the planet has the power to view a black hole directly. To do so, it would need to be size of the Earth. But where one telescope is weak, many telescopes standing together are strong. And so it was that eight powerful telescopes across the globe banded together to form a consortium known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
The ALMA and APEX in Chile, the IRAM 30m in Spain, the LMT in Mexico, the SMT in Arizona, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and SMA in Hawaii, and the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica made up the team. For a week in April 2017, all eight telescopes focus on the black hole in M87.
While it was truly a team effort, the difference-maker may have been ALMA in Chile, which has a dish the size of a football field. Vincent Fish, an astronomer at MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Mass, said to ScienceNews:
“ALMA changed everything. Anything that you were just barely struggling to detect before, you get really solid detections now.”
Processing the massive amount of data eight telescopes can generate was a challenge in its own right. Dan Marrone, an astrophysicist a the University of Arizona who sits on the EHT’s science council, tells the Washington Post it was equivalent to “entire selfie collection over a lifetime for 40,000 people.”In 2016, MIT computer scientist Katie Bouman developed a new algorithm just to handle it all.
The EHT consortium used a process called interferometry, which combines the signals detected by pairs of telescopes so that they interfere with each other. Baumann's algorithm was able to detect the extremely slight differences between each satellite's captured radio waves, allowing supercomputers to turn them into a visual image.
“A black hole is very, very far away and very compact,” Bouman said at the time. “[Taking a picture of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is] equivalent to taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope. To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers.” " I GOT THE ANSWER FROM https://www.popularmechanics.com
