Described as “the gates of hell and the end of spacetime” –the international group of scientists of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) that engaged the world with the first ever image of a gargantuan black hole in the M87 galaxy and just won $3 million for the “Oscar of science”, are planning a sequel.
The sequel will be a movie showing how massive clouds of gas are forever sucked into the void. The EHT Collaboration is processing the mountains of data to produce the first video in 2020.
“The EHT has delivered more value than any other scientific project that I can think of in history,” Shep Doeleman, the project’s director said. “We do see ourselves as explorers, we’ve taken a journey in our minds. And we are instruments at the edge of a black hole. And now we’re coming back to report what we found.”
“What I predict is that by the end of the next decade we will be making high quality real-time movies of black holes that reveal not just how they look, but how they act on the cosmic stage,” Doeleman, told AFP in an interview.
Beyond the EHT –“Big-Screen Black Holes”
The entire team, comprising 347 scientists from around the world, were honored Thursday with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, winning $3 million for the image they released on April 10.
“I’ve been working on this for 20 years. So my wife was finally convinced that what I was doing was worth it a little bit,” joked the 52-year-old father of two, who is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“A Galaxy Fell Through It” –Creating the EHT’s Monster M87 Black Hole
Astronomers could previously detect the light that is being swallowed by black holes, but “we just didn’t have the sharpness in our images to see what shape the light had.”
“Paradoxical, Intriguing, Frightening” –The Black Hole Bigger Than Our Solar System
That obstacle was ultimately overcome when the team linked multiple radio telescopes together, thus simulating an Earth-sized giant telescope capable of observing at an unprecedented resolution objects that appear microscopic in the night sky.
Toward the end of the 2000s, the hard work began to pay off. The team obtained approval to use three telescopes to establish a proof of concept, and in 2008 published the first measurements of a black hole. By April 2017, they had assembled eight radio telescopes in Chile, Spain, Mexico, the US, and the South Pole. The giant instruments observe high frequency radio waves, allowing astronomers to see through the gas and dust of the galaxy, all the way through to the boundaries of black holes.
“The Gates of Hell, The End of Spacetime” –World’s Scientists Speak Out On EHT’s Black Hole Picture
In addition to its observations of the black hole in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, the team also looked at the one at the center of our own Milky Way: Sagittarius-A*. They took readings in 2018, and plan to repeat them next year.
Our own black hole is far more turbulent and therefore difficult to observe. “Orbits of matter around M87 take about a month to circulate. Whereas orbits around Sagittarius-A* can take only half an hour, during one night of observing Sagittarius-A* can change before your eyes,” explained Doeleman.
Guide to First Photo of Milky Way’s Central Black Hole
“It could be that maybe we will make the first crude movie” by 2020, he added. Ideally, scientists would need more telescopes, both on Earth and in orbit, to improve the resolution yet further.
But the manner in which the first image of M87 has captured people’s imagination has left Doeleman optimistic about the prospect of future funding, both from governments and possibly private donors.
The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via AFP and Event Horizon Telescope
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