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Washington (AFP) – By the time an international group of scientists stunned the world with the very first image of a black hole, they were already planning a sequel: a movie showing how big gas clouds are being sucked forever in the void.
The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has already recorded the necessary observations and is processing mountains of data to produce the first video, which will probably be a little jerky, in 2020.
"What I predict, is that by the end of the next decade, we will produce high quality, real-time black hole movies, which not only reveal their appearance, but also their behavior. on the cosmic scene, "Shep Doeleman, project director, told AFP during an interview.
The entire team, made up of 347 scientists from around the world, received Thursday the Breakthrough Award in Basic Physics, winning $ 3 million for the "Oscar for Science" for the published image April 10th.
"I've been working on this project for 20 years, and my wife was finally convinced that what I was doing was worth it a bit," joked the 52-year-old father and astronomer at Harvard. Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers could already detect the light swallowed by black holes, but "we simply did not have the sharpness of our images to see what shape the light had."
This obstacle was finally overcome when the team connected several radio telescopes, simulating a giant telescope the size of the Earth, able to observe at an unprecedented resolution objects that appear microscopic in the night sky.
– The galactic explorers –
In the late 2000s, hard work began to pay off. The team has obtained permission to use three telescopes to establish a proof of concept and, in 2008, released the first measures of a black hole.
In April 2017, they had assembled eight radio telescopes in Chile, Spain, Mexico, the United States and the South Pole.
Giant instruments observe high-frequency radio waves, allowing astronomers to see through the gas and dust of the galaxy up to the limits of black holes.
In addition to his observations of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy (M87), the team also examined the one located 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 much more turbulent and therefore difficult to observe.
"The orbits around M87 take about a month to circulate, while the orbits around Sagittarius-A * can last only half an hour, a night of observation of Sagittarius-A * can change under your eyes "said Doeleman.
"We could maybe make the first raw film" by 2020, he added. Ideally, scientists would need more telescopes, both on Earth and in orbit, to further improve resolution.
But how the first image of M87 captured people's imagination left Doeleman optimistic about the prospect of future funding, both by governments and possibly by private donors.
"The EHT has brought more value than any other scientific project I can think of in history," he said.
"We see ourselves as explorers, we have traveled in our minds, and we are instruments at the edge of a black hole, and now we come back to point out what we found."
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