The picture of M87’s black hole wasn’t nearly as sharp as the depictions of black holes you’ve seen in movies such as “Interstellar.” With a limited number of participating telescopes, even VLBI can take you only so far.įortunately, more telescopes have joined the campaign over the past couple of years, and astronomers are working on ways to improve their data processing methods at different wavelengths. “These are just singular moments in history,” he said. Even people who may not understand the physics of black holes “know it’s really, really cool,” Droegemeier told GeekWire.
White House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier said he ranked the Event Horizon Telescope’s image right up there with the Nobel-winning first detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO. “And the image is pretty amazing as well.” “It’s taken a lot longer than we expected, but it’s a really amazing technical accomplishment,” Agol, who isn’t on the EHT team, told GeekWire by telephone after seeing the picture for the first time. University of Washington astronomer Eric Agol played a key role in suggesting VLBI as a way to view the “shadows” of supermassive black holes back in 1999. “Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test, this one spanning from horizons to the stars,” he said. “We just got lucky,” said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam who is a member of the EHT Science Council.ĭoeleman said the team was still working to produce an image of Sagittarius A*, but the task is more complex than it is for M87.Īvery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at Canada’s Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo, noted that the circular shape of the event horizon was totally consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But if it were too active, the superheated gas surrounding the black hole would have been too bright to see the event horizon’s dark circle. M87’s black hole was easier to spot than our own galaxy’s black hole because it’s in more of an active state. “It’s the equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles when we’re standing right here in D.C.,” Doeleman said.īased on the pattern of light surrounding the black hole, scientists could even figure out that it’s spinning clockwise. As big as it is, spotting the black hole from tens of billions of light-years away was a challenge. The image released today shows the radio signature of M87’s black hole, which is about 23.6 billion miles wide - more than four times as wide as the orbit of Neptune - and 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. The technique for synchronizing observations effectively turns their network into a huge radio telescope almost as wide as our planet. To bring the picture into focus, the Event Horizon Telescope’s teammates had to combine their observations using a technique known as very long baseline interferometry, or VLBI.
Results from any one of the telescopes wouldn’t have anywhere near the resolution to make out the hot surroundings of the black hole. The EHT facilities were in Arizona, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Spain and even the South Pole. The team also tried capturing an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, about 55 million light-years from Earth. In April 2017, eight radio telescope facilities that are participating in the Event Horizon Telescope project took a close look at our galaxy’s central region, known as Sagittarius A* (that is, Sagittarius A-star, abbreviated as Sgr A*).
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