In April 2019, 4.5 billion people saw the first image of a black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy, located 55 million light years from Earth. The author of this work, Luciano Rezzolla – Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin – was part of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC) team who produced the image.
The EHTC scientists followed that remarkable achievement up in May 2022 by taking the first image of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. For decades, theoretical physicists and supercomputers had predicted there were black holes at the centre of galaxies devouring everything in their path. Yet, it seemed that black holes were too weird to be real, until that image confirmed they were, and that yes, we really do live in a strange universe.
The image produced by the EHTC was a heroic scientific effort given that black holes are invisible because they destroy light that comes too near. This meant that other, creative scientific methods were required to capture an image of the physical effects of a black hole on the areas around it.
This book – an attempt to write a popular title describing the science of black holes, gravitational waves, neutron stars and the like – is similarly heroic. In places it is brilliant, and the author provides wonderful real-world analogies to make opaque scientific concepts accessible to us all.
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The author wants to reach a non-scientific audience, and, in that context, it is debatable whether he should have included mathematical equations. The sight of equations, numbers and Greek symbols will, I suspect, prompt many people to put this book down, but that would be a great pity.
We learn that the merging or fusion of two neutron stars produces mind-boggling amounts of energy, bright enough to be seen across the cosmos
There is an enormous amount to be learned in here about our universe, and the staggering science going on to unlock its deepest secrets. The difficulty for many of us is trying to imagine a violent universe that is in many places very different to our benign, stable, life-encouraging Earth.
On black holes, we learn they are created after enormous stars die, collapsing in on themselves and producing supernova explosions. We learn that the merging or fusion of two neutron stars produces mind-boggling amounts of energy, bright enough to be seen across the cosmos. Readers learn about space-time; how it can be bent and distorted, and why it is difficult to imagine the universe’s weirdness on a cosmically stable planet.
[ Irish astronomers play part in first ever observation of star explosionOpens in new window ]
[ Black hole discovered in star cluster outside Milky WayOpens in new window ]
A tendency to sometimes slide into too much detail, scientific jargon and mathematical equations aside, this is a great insider’s tale from a member of the team who produced an image hailed as “the photo of the century”.
Seán Duke is communications officer for the Faculty of Science and Health at DCU
