THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 9, 1994 TAG: 9407090003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
Cosmic discovery is on a fast track just now.
In fact, great achievements by Earth's astronomers and their instruments are coming so fast - what with the repaired Hubble space telescope and all - that we can't wrap our minds around one feat before we are whacked with another stunner.
A for-instance is the one-two punch involving (1) the telescopic identification of a humongous ``black hole,'' so dense that it has already swallowed billions of stars in a distant galaxy, and (2) the forecast of a collision (just a few days from now) of a comet and the planet Jupiter in our own solar system..
However, as dramatic a headline-grabber as the Jupiter event will be (with a series of impacts from the 21-plus segments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9), this spectacular can't really obscure the vaster meaning of what the Hubble, with its spectroscopic camera, has proclaimed in the case of that black hole in galaxy M87.
Everything about black holes has been outsize, since they were first proposed in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. They are bodies so dense that their super-gravity vacuums in everything for zillions of miles around, and won't even let light go out (hence the ``black'' descriptive).
As to the statistics on the just-located monster in M87, which lies 52 million light years from Earth, the figures bear out the theories. We are pushed further yet beyond workaday human comprehension.
And there's something else to wonder at - actually, to admire - in this discovery. This has to do with the discoverers' technology.
For they were up against an obvious difficulty: Since all the light is being sucked down the cosmic drain with the rest of the nearby stuff, how do you ever get a photograph of one of these things? Well, the data the experts got, and the pictures they are passing around now, identify the black hole by materials and movements in the vicinity. A neat and effective improvisation, it seems.
We still can't see the black hole itself. We can't see them anywhere else either, as a matter of physical law, and won't, I guess, unless we ourselves spin in on one somewhere.
With no time or inclination for pictures. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB