ASTRONOMERS MAY HAVE JUST TAKEN THE FIRST PHOTO OF A BLACK HOLE
ACTION RESEARCH OPINION: Mysteries of Nature, yet scientific knowlegde is dark yet. *** Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/astronomers-may-just-taken-first-170725479.html
Science
Astronomers May Have Just Taken the First Photo of a Black Hole
Over the past week, astronomers have trained half a dozen telescopes around the world at a single point at the center of our galaxy. The goal? To finally catch a glimpse of a black hole.
The network of telescopes covers half the globe, from the South Pole to Europe and both Americas. For five days, these six telescopes all pointed at one small spot in the constellation Sagittarius termed Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"). Years of observations have revealed that Sagittarius A* is likely the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, and now these six telescopes are working together to get the very first picture of it.
Observing Sagittarius A* is not easy. It's surrounded by a large cloud of dust and gas that's impervious to most light. The six telescopes that are making this most recent effort, collectively dubbed the "Event Horizon Telescope," rely on radio waves in the narrow frequencies that can penetrate the dense nebulae around the black hole.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Starting April 4, these six radio telescopes pointed their receivers toward Sagittarius A* every night for five nights and collected a mountain of data. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait several months to see the results of that data. The observatories collected so much data that they can't transmit it wirelessly, and instead have to ship it using more than a thousand physical hard drives.
These hard drives will be sent to processing centers at MIT and Germany, and the data from the South Pole telescope will be delayed until the end of winter in October. Once all the data is collected, it needs to be processed by computers that painstakingly combine thousands of observations into a single image.
Once the process is finally finished, astronomers hope to finally have the first real image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. It's tough to say exactly what it will look like, but they are expecting to see a bright halo of light surrounding a large black circle. The edge of the circle is the black hole's event horizon, the region beyond which even light cannot escape, and the bright halo is superheated gas and dust burning at billions of degrees.
Photo credit: NASA/CXC/Stanford/I. Zhuravleva et al.
Of course, there's also the possibility that even with all of this effort, they won't get a picture at all. But astronomers already have plans to make even more observations next year with even more telescopes. As more radio observatories are built in Africa, the Pacific, and in orbit, astronomers will be able to produce even clearer images of whatever lurks in the heart of our Milky Way.
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