|

In astrophysics milestone, first photo of black hole expected

News Service
16:17 - 6/04/2019 Saturday
Update: 16:18 - 6/04/2019 Saturday
REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: A supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun is seen in an undated NASA artist's concept illustration. REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun is seen in an undated NASA artist's concept illustration. REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout/File Photo

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES

The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes.

The first - called Sagittarius A* - is situated at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The second - called M87 - resides at the center of the neighboring Virgo A galaxy, boasting a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light-years away from Earth. Streaming away from M87 at nearly the speed of light is a humongous jet of subatomic particles.

Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are extraordinarily dense entities formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation and perhaps merging with other black holes.

Psaltis described a black hole as "an extreme warp in spacetime," a term referring to the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time joined into a single four-dimensional continuum.

Doeleman said the project's researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 from a global network of telescopes. The telescopes that collected that initial data are located in the U.S. states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the network.

The scientists also will be trying to detect for the first time the dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds before being swallowed into oblivion.

The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light - radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole's shadow or silhouette.

Einstein's theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole.

"The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein's theory," Psaltis said. "If we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, 'Clearly, something is not exactly right.'"

#Black hole
#astrophysics
5 years ago