Three years after the first photograph of a black hole was published, an international team of scientists released new imagethis time filmed in our own galaxy, in supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
It was a long awaited announcement. And it’s been a few weeks now European Southern Observatory (ESO) warned that they need to tell something very important about our galaxy, Milky Way. We now know that it is this long-awaited image that shows that the technology to immortalize black holes is becoming more and more advanced.
It is the result of a collaborative effort between several telescopes located at observatories around the world as part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium. This is great news, how to repeat 2019 in our own galaxy and because of the difficulties involved. And that’s what Sagittarius A*, located 27,000 light-years from Earth, is obscured by a cloud of dust and gas, making it difficult to observe. In fact, scientists have previously seen stars orbiting something invisible, compact, and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. For this reason, they suspected it to be a black hole, but there was no direct evidence for this until this image was taken. And it wasn’t easy.
How is a black hole photographed?
When the photograph of black hole M87* in the galaxy Virgo A, it became clear that this was not, in fact, an image of the black hole itself. And this is a phenomenon that cannot be seen or photographed. Nothing can escape them, not even light, so a black hole mostly dark.
It is true that we cannot see a black hole as such. But you can in a certain way catch the silhouette of matter that revolves around him, while he is attracted to his inner space.
A black hole is mostly darkness, so it cannot be seen or photographed as such.
For this reason, the EHT consortium was launched in 2015 with the aim of directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole with an angular resolution comparable to the dimensions event horizon. The latter, also known as the event horizon, is roughly the point from which nothing can escape a black hole. Each year, the consortium ran campaigns aimed at analyzing the surrounding space, mainly two black holes. Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our Milky Way, and M87*, which is located at the center of the Virgo A galaxy.
The latter could be immortalized in a certain way in 2019. It was not a photograph of a black hole per se. Rather it was radiation interpretation emitted by the black hole absorbs business around him. They have computer programs that translate the radiation detected by the telescopes located at the various observatories that make up the EHT into images. This is how the photograph of the black hole M87* was obtained. However, the dust around Sagittarius A* made it difficult to obtain these data which is then translated into images. It took another three years, but the time has finally come.
Presentation in Sagittarius Society A*
The presentation of the photograph of Sagittarius A * took place on May 12 this year. ECO headquarterslocated in Garching, Germany. They interfered in the press conference Thomas KrichbaumInstitute of Radio Astronomy. Max Planck, Sara Issofrom the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Jose Luis GomezInstitute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Christian Frommfrom the University of Würzburg and Mariafelicia de Laurentiisfrom the University of Naples.
They all participated in a process whose data were extracted thanks to observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile, the 30-meter IRAM telescope located in Velet, in the Sierra Nevada, Telescope James Clark Maxwell (JCMT) and Submillimeter Array (SMA), both at Maunakea in Hawaii, the South Pole Telescope, the Alfonso Serrano Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) located in Mexico, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) from Arizona.
The result, thanks to this collaboration, is a photograph of a black hole that somewhat resembles the one taken in 2019. However, these are two completely different black holes. Sagittarius A* 1000 times smaller and less massive than M87*. And this is what, as he explained at the press conference Sera Markofff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council, “General relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see farther away must be due to differences in the material surrounding black holes.”
The smaller size of our black hole was another factor that made photographing more difficult. He stated this in his statement. Chi Kwang Chanfrom the University of Arizona.
“While it takes a few days to a few weeks for the gas to complete a revolution around M87*, in Sagittarius it completes a complete revolution in a matter of minutes. This means that the brightness and texture of the gas around Sgr A was changing rapidly while the EHT collaboration observed it, sort of like trying to get a clear image of a puppy that is rapidly chasing its tail.”
Chi-Kwan Chan, University of Arizona
But, despite all the difficulties, they succeeded develop new tools which led to the long-awaited photo. Now, when we want to represent a black hole, we will have the representation that was made for interstellar on the advice of physicist Kip Thorne, a photo of the black hole M87* from 2019, as well as a photo of Sagittarius A*. There is even a place to choose. Who was going to tell us?
Source: Hiper Textual
