The imperceptible has been shown. The Never Seen: The First Photo Of A Black Hole.
A super-massive black hole, has been photographed by a community of astronomers living in the peaceful area of the Solar System.
The picture, released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium, confirms the existence of these bewildering stars predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and will help clarify how they work.
In addition, it’s supported for the first time that the predictions of this theory of relativity from the extreme gravity states of a supermassive black hole.
“This is a historic moment. It will transform our understanding of black holes,” said astrophysicist France Cordova, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, in one of the press conferences at which the breakthrough was introduced, held in Washington and broadcast across the net.
The picture corresponds to the central black hole of the M87 galaxy, a monster with a mass equal to 6.5 billion suns.
The ring is made up of thing that rotates at very large speed across the black hole. The quicker part corresponds to thing that is rotating in the direction of the Earth, although the dark part corresponds to matter that is moving away.
Black holes are stars with gravitational fields so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape them.
They grow by gobbling up the stars that approach them and which, once they have crossed the so-called horizon of events, cannot return to the outer universe.
In the centre of the black hole, the curvature of space-time becomes infinite and a singularity is produced, where the laws of physics that we know cease to be valid.
Research confirms validity of relativity theory in extreme gravity conditions of super-massive black holes
This has led to the hypothesis that the big bang that originated our universe could have occurred inside a black hole.
The EHT consortium (Event Horizon Telescope, referring to the point of no return of black holes from which light cannot escape) has observed the two black holes that have a larger apparent size in the sky when observed from Earth.
The center of the Milky Way has a mass 4.3 million times greater than that of the Sun compressed into a diameter of 30 suns. Although small for the center of a large galaxy, it is the closest supermassive black hole to Earth, at a distance of 26,000 light years.
The one in the center of galaxy M87, on the other hand, is a real giant. With a mass of 6,500 million suns, it is about 1,500 times more massive than that of the Milky Way. And although it is 2,000 times further away, 55 million light-years away, it is still close enough for the M87 galaxy to be seen with an amateur telescope.
The images presented today correspond to the black hole of M87. The Milky Way “is very interesting and complex. We are working on it. We hope to have results to present very soon”, said Sheperd Doeleman, astrophysicist at Harvard University (USA) and director of the EHT consortium.
The consortium observed these two black holes for ten nights in April 2017 with a network of eight radio telescopes located in North America, South America, Europe, Antarctica and Hawaii.
These eight observatories, which pointed to the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy simultaneously synchronized by atomic clocks, acted in practice as a single radio telescope with a diameter equivalent to that of the Earth.
It has taken two years of work to analyze the enormous amount of data collected in those ten nights of observations.
The EHT consortium has observed the black holes in the centre of the Milky Way and in the M87 galaxy.
The results have been announced at six simultaneous press conferences held in Washington, Brussels, Santiado de Chile, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo, highlighting the fact that the EHT consortium has been an international collaboration.
In Madrid, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) organised a seventh press conference to highlight Spain’s participation in the project.
The 30-metre IRAM radio telescope, built next to the Pico Veleta in Sierra Nevada, is one of the seven that have formed part of the EHT.
Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, the Instituto Geográfico Nacional, the Instituto de Radioastronomía Milimétrica and the University of Valencia took part in the press conference in Madrid.
For the future, it is planned to continue direct observations of black holes, which will become a new field of astronomical research.
The EHT network was extended last year with a ninth radio telescope located in Greenland – although no data from the 2018 observation campaign have been presented today, which are still being analysed – and this year it will be extended with a tenth located in Arizona.
Later, “we want to go into space,” said Doeleman, who is expected to win the Nobel Prize in Physics sometime in the next decade for the discovery presented today.
A space telescope will make it possible to observe black holes without losing the information filtered through the Earth’s atmosphere. “As with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning,” Doeleman said.
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