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Scientists could soon create the world's first video of a black hole in motion behind a groundbreaking picture of the phenomenon released last week.
Experts using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have announced that they would produce a video of hot gas swirling chaotically around the shadow or "black hole" accretion disk.
The supermassive black hole is at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, about 54 million light-years from Earth.
EHT is a "virtual" telescope that uses observatory data from around the world to turn the entire Earth into a single giant detector.
Researchers believe that more telescopes will join the EHT project, they will be able to produce more detailed images and possibly film the black hole.
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Scientists could soon create the first video footage of a black hole in motion behind a groundbreaking picture of the phenomenon released last week (photo). Experts say that they will produce a video of hot gas swirling chaotically around the black hole
Experts say that it would be relatively simple to make a movie on the black hole of M87.
To do this, researchers sometimes have to work seven weeks in a row to get seven individual images and then see what has shifted from one image to the other.
"It turns out that even now, with what we have, we may be able, with some previous assumptions, to examine rotating signatures [evidence of the accretion disk swirling around the event horizon]Shep Doeleman, the astronomer of Harvard University who heads the EHT project, told Live Science.
And then, if we had a lot more stations, we could really start seeing real-time movies about black hole growth and rotation.
"If we want to … make an accelerated film, then we go out the next day or week."
How did the scientists capture the image of a black hole? As the graph explains, the method relies on observing material that swirls around the edges before falling into the black hole itself. This heats up to extreme temperatures, causing it to emit a bright light that appears as a ring around the black hole
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT GALAXY MESSIER 87?
The elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to several trillions of stars, a supermassive black hole and a family of about 15,000 globular star clusters.
For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy contains only a few hundred billion stars and about 150 globular clusters.
The monstrous M87 is the dominant member of the galaxy group near Virgo, which contains about 2,000 galaxies.
Discovered in 1781 by Charles Messier, this galaxy is located 54 million light years from Earth in the constellation of the Virgin.
You can easily observe it with the help of a small telescope, offering the most spectacular views of the month of May.
The elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to several trillions of stars, a supermassive black hole and a family of about 15,000 globular star clusters. This Hubble image is a composite of individual observations in visible and infrared light
The most striking features of the M87 are the blue jet near the center and the myriad of star-shaped globular clusters scattered throughout the image.
The jet is a flow of material fed by a black hole that is ejected from the heart of M87.
As the gaseous matter in the center of the galaxy increases on the black hole, the released energy produces a stream of subatomic particles that are accelerated at speeds near the speed of light.
In the center of the Virgo cluster, M87 may have accumulated some of its many globular clusters by gravitationally attracting neighboring dwarf galaxies that seem to be devoid of these clusters today.
The team is also studying Sagittarius A * (SagA *), the supermassive black hole in the center of our own galaxy.
Scientists said at the unveiling of the M87 image last week that they planned to publish soon the first image of this much closer object.
But ISE researchers think this project will be more complicated because SagA * is about 1,000 times less massive than the M87 black hole.
This means that the image changes 1000 times faster & # 39;in minutes or hours & # 39 ;.
"You have to develop a fundamentally different algorithm because it's as if the lens of your camera was clogged up and something was moving during shooting," Douleman said.
Pictured from left to right: Sheperd Doeleman, Director of the Horizon Telescope, Director of the National Science Foundation, France Cordova, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, Dan Marrone, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Will Markoff
To make a footage, the EHT should collect all the data needed to produce an image of the black hole.
It should then also divide this data into several parts over time.
Then the team compared the data with each other using sophisticated algorithms to see how the image was changing.
This approach uses image displacement models, comparing these models to actual data to see if it is appropriate.
"You have to be smart and understand how the data in this time frame is related to that time frame right after," Doeleman said.
With the help of this method, the team can convert even a very limited amount of data from one minute to the other into complete SagA images * in motion.
As a result, the team plans to shoot movies of the smallest black hole in one night.
While black holes are inherently invisible, the ultra-hot material swirling in the middle of these forms a ring of light around the perimeter that reveals the mouth of the object itself according to its silhouette. This limit is called the horizon of events. A simulation of the black hole is illustrated above with the new historical image.
HOW DOES THE TELESCOPE HORIZON EVENT WORK?
With the help of a "virtual telescope", built from eight radio observatories located in different parts of the globe, the team behind the Event Horizon telescope has spent the last years to probe Sagittarius A *, the supermassive black hole in the heart of the Milky Way, and another target in the Virgo galaxy group.
The observations are based on a network of widely spaced radio antennas.
These are all over the world – South Pole, Hawaii, Europe and America.
These radios mimic the opening of a telescope that can produce the resolution needed to capture Sagittarius A.
On each of the radio stations, there are large hard drives that will store the data.
These hard drives are then processed at MIT Haystack Observatory, just outside Boston, Massachusetts.
The effort is essentially to capture the silhouette of a black hole, commonly called its shadow.
It would be "its dark form on a bright background of light coming from the surrounding matter, distorted by a sharp space-time curvature," says the ETH team.
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