Black hole

Scientists are waiting for new images to confirm whether the data are consistent with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. A more thorough analysis ...

We collected data with one additional telescope in 2018, and with three additional telescopes in 2022, and we are working very hard to get it to you as soon as possible. But I have no idea about when.” Can’t promise,” said Brazilian researcher at EHT, Lia Medeiros in North American Press from the New Jersey Institute for Advanced Studies. Even the data collected in the studies released this week will need to be reevaluated.

Although the black hole itself is invisible, glowing gas around it reveals a tell-tale signature: a dark central region.

The end result is a clear first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.” By employing this groundbreaking technology to observe Sgr A* on multiple nights and collect data for long periods of time, the researchers created a library of millions of images which then needed to be interpreted theoretically to assess what type of astronomical objects they had in fact detected. “For decades, astronomers have wondered what lies at the heart of our galaxy, pulling stars into tight orbits through its immense gravity,” said Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at Harvard University. “With the image [captured by Event Horizon Telescope or EHT], we have zoomed in a thousand times closer than these orbits, where the gravity grows a million times stronger.

A simulated view of a black hole from the 2014 film 'Interstellar'. Image: YouTube. Black holes swallow light – yet their strong gravitational pull exerts ...

With its stated angular resolution, the EHT interferometer could access the former because it’s the closest to us and because the latter – while 54 million light years away – is one of the largest of its kind known. It requires several computers to ensure they’re pointing at the same part of the sky at the same time and tracking the right wave frequencies. As a result, the SMA has more than 80-times better angular resolution than if it were to use each of the antennae separately. One, light that enters the ergosphere in the direction opposite to that of the black hole’s rotation will be forced to turn around and start moving along the rotation. Then there is the accretion disc, where millions upon millions of tonnes of intergalactic matter – gas, dust and rocks – orbit the black hole. But the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, for example, consists of eight radio telescopes, each with a six-metre-wide dish, and a total baseline of up to 508 metres. Each radio telescope treats the radio signals coming from outer space as waves – and this is why the telescope itself doesn’t ‘see’ the signal like our eyes see light. In all, it’s a site of intense activity – but the same activity, together with our distance from it, makes it very difficult to actually see these things. Black holes, however, would wrap the sheet completely around themselves – so light that’s flowing on the sheet will just round and round in circles, trapped on the surface of the sphere. The third is the ergosphere, the region of space near the event horizon where objects will get bent around the black hole but not fall inwards into the singularity. The fourth is the accretion disc, a ring of objects orbiting the black hole, like planets around a star. By accurately tracking and studying these distortions, we can catch sight of the black hole itself.

A supermassive black hole at the centre of the earth's Milky Way galaxy has been discovered by scientists. Supplied image. Published 1h ago. Written by. Staff ...

“We have images for two black holes — one at the large end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the Universe — so we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before.” This is because the image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the centre of our galaxy for the first time. “We have two completely different types of galaxies and two very different black hole masses, but close to the edge of these black holes they look amazingly similar,” she said. Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands said that the two black holes look remarkably similar, even though our galaxy’s black hole is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive than M87. The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera and the breakthrough follows the EHT collaboration’s 2019 release of the first image of a black hole, called M87*, at the centre of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy. During the briefing, scientists explained that this result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies.

THE world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what ...

“We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things are calm out here.” (AP) Bower said it is probably more typical of what’s at the center of most galaxies, “just sitting there doing very little.” The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein’s equations dictate. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy.

The image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy isn't only an incredible scientific achievement - it also agrees precisely with predictions.

This scaling is unusual because most things that exist at different scales look very different — Psaltis gives the example of an ant and an elephant, which look very different because of, among other factors, the way their mass is supported. The black hole, called Sagittarius A*, is a type called a supermassive black hole, which is found at the center of almost all galaxies. “It’s all predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the only theory in the cosmos that does not care about scale.”