"Hubble Science"
"Black Holes // From Myth to Reality"
One of the Hubble space telescope's major achievements was the confirmation
that galaxies have in their core supermassive black holes.
At least for a time were kind of a mythical idea, you know, a mathematical possibility coming from
the physics, but it was not clear decades ago whether we could actually observe a black hole
because kind of by definition black holes are not viewable, the light cannot escape.
So the question is, could you observe effects of black holes to determine that they are there?
Now the way Hubble has detected this is by looking not at the black hole which
is really impossible to see, what we see is material right around the black hole
particularly this galaxy called M87 which has a spectacular ejected jet which you can see.
And often we see material orbiting that inner black hole, like gas, and orbiting very fast so
we can use the instruments on Hubble to discern whether material on one side of
the black hole is moving away from us and the material on the other side is moving toward us
as you might expect if the material is orbiting. Since that time Hubble has followed up with many
other galaxies and seen evidence for supermassive black holes so we now believe that most
and maybe all galaxies have some kind of supermassive black hole in the center.
[ INTENSE MUSIC ]
People did not dream that that would be true. It wasn't that long ago that people thought
there were no black holes, then we thought well we don't imagine how they could exist so there
probably aren't any. And now we are forced into understanding how come there are so many of them.
[ INTENSE MUSIC ]