Astronomers create detailed map of supermassive black holes

Astronomers have designed the most detailed map of supermassive black holes in the universe so far, indicating that mysterious and powerful entities are not as rare as they are often seen, and black holes are the entities most powerful and mysterious in the universe, and they are breaks in the structure of time, resulting from the explosion of stars or the collision of neutron stars.

According to the Russian “RT” website, an international team of astronomers has created the most detailed map of supermassive black holes in the universe, and supermassive black holes are entities that can reach 10 billion masses from the sun. .

And there are 25,000 supermassive black holes on the map alone, just a fraction of what actually exists in the entire universe, with data collected from just 4% of the sky in the northern hemisphere.

The team created the map using 52 low-frequency telescopes, called LOFAR, capable of detecting radio emissions from matter very close to a supermassive black hole.

“This is the result of many years of working on very difficult data,” said Francesco de Gasperin, head of research, who previously worked at Leiden University in the Netherlands and now at the University of Hamburg. , in Germany.

We had to devise new ways of converting radio signals into images of the sky. “

The map was created by combining data from 256 hours of northern sky observations.

What made the search more difficult was that long radio observations were obscured by the Earth’s ionosphere.

This layer of the atmosphere is devoid of electrons and acts like a “cloudy lens”.

“It’s similar to what happens when you try to see the world submerged in a swimming pool,” said co-author Reinot van Weren. “When you look up in the air, the waves on the pool water deflect the light rays and distort the view.”

Scientists have developed supercomputers that use algorithms that “correct for the effect of the ionosphere every four seconds”.

“After so many years of software development, it’s great to see that it really worked,” said Leiden Observatory Scientific Director Hope Röttegring.

Sagittarius A * is the closest black hole to Earth – a supermassive black hole, the arc has a radius of 22 million kilometers and a mass more than four million times the mass of the sun.