Substitute while the actions of the article are loading
On Thursday, astronomers discovered the first image of a supermassive black hole that excites the center of our galaxy, its gravity so powerful that it bends space and time and forms a glowing ring of light with eternal darkness in the core.
The black hole seen from Earth near the constellation Sagittarius has a mass equal to more than 4 million suns. The new image shows it with three bright spots along a ring that, to the surprise of scientists, tilts its face toward the Earth.
By the standards of other supermassive black holes, scientists said, the one at the heart of our Milky Way is relatively calm – as quiet as something that swallows stars and reaches trillions of degrees can be.
Ferial Ozel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, described the achievement as “the first direct image of the gentle giant at the center of our galaxy.”
“We find a bright ring around the shadow of the black hole,” she said. “Black holes look like donuts.”
The image was taken by a global consortium of astronomical observatories known as the Event Horizon Telescope. Three years ago, the project created the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87.
The black hole in the center of the Milky Way is more than a thousand times smaller than the one in Messier 87. But from a cosmic point of view, it is closest to home. The unveiling of the image at the National Press Club in Washington was part of simultaneous media events on several continents. The image was kept secret pending unveiling at exactly 9:07 a.m. Eastern Time.
The achievement, backed by the National Science Foundation, relies on the contributions of more than 300 scientists from 80 institutions, including eight telescopes. The processing and analysis of the collected data took years. The black hole itself is not static, but changes in appearance in a short time scale, challenging scientists to create a unique image that matches what their telescopes have observed. And the pandemic added its own challenges.
“The pandemic slowed us down, but it couldn’t stop us,” Vincent Fish, a researcher at the MIT Haystack Observatory, told a news conference.
See a black hole for the first time in a historical image from the Event Horizon telescope
The work turned out to be exciting in the end.
“What’s cooler than seeing the black hole in the center of our Milky Way?” Said team member Catherine Booman, a computer scientist at Caltech.
“They are the most mysterious objects in the universe and hold the keys to a large-scale structure in outer space,” said Shepard Doleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and founder of the Event Horizon Telescope. , in an interview before Thursday’s briefing.
The central black hole of the Milky Way has so far been derived from its effect on stars and dust near it, not directly observed. It is very far away – about 27,000 light-years – and despite its “supermassive” designation, it is not very big in the big scheme of things, which makes direct observation with telescopes extremely difficult.
This challenge led to the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope, which is not one telescope, but a whole group of them. The project uses an observational technique known as very long base interferometry, which requires careful calibration to allow multiple radio dishes scattered around the planet to function as if they were a single Earth-sized instrument. The consortium claims that this technique allows the separation of distant objects, which would be equivalent to being able to spot a ping-pong ball on the moon.
Black holes are available in two scales: “star mass”, which is formed when stars collapse, and “supermassive” monsters, which can weigh millions or even billions of times more than our sun and for which the Event Horizon Telescope is designed.
“The black hole attracts a lot of gas. Its gravitational pull is so strong that the matter around it cannot stand. But it pulls him into a very small space, “Doeleman said. “Imagine sucking an elephant through a straw.”
A brief history of black holes as we await the big revelation from the Event Horizon Telescope
The event horizon of a black hole is the no-return limit – the point at which a falling piece of matter disappears into an inevitable gravitational well. As strange and mysterious as a black hole is, Earthlings need to understand this it does not pose a threat to our world and is essentially only part of the galactic furniture.
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity of 1915 postulated that gravity was the result of massive objects bending the fabric of space-time. While theorists irritated the consequences of Einstein’s equations, they realized that an object of sufficient mass would create a gravitational well so serious that not even light could escape.
The idea of such black holes remained largely in the theoretical sphere until the end of the 20th century. Gravitational waves of colliding black holes were discovered in 2016.
Decades ago, astronomers realized that there was something in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy that emitted huge amounts of radiation. This was the brightest object near the constellation Sagittarius. Is it made of a black hole? This became a consensus. The luminous astronomical object became known as Sagittarius A *.
Astrophysicists Andrea Gez and Reinhard Hansel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 for discovering that stars in the galactic center of the Milky Way move in a pattern corresponding to orbits around a supermassive black hole.
Astrophysicists believe that black holes are common in the nucleus of galaxies – and in some ways inherent in galactic evolution – although the question of chicken and egg remains unresolved. One possibility is that black holes are the seed of a galaxy. The other is that black holes form more gradually when stars fall into the galaxy’s central gravitational well.
Add Comment