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By Corey S. Powell
When the very first direct image of a black hole was unveiled on Wednesday, scientists around the world were almost upset to finally be able to see one of the most mysterious objects in the universe.
"A unique result in life," said Shep Doeleman, director of Event Horizon Telescope, the international team of scientists who created the image with the help of a radio telescope network. interconnected to form a single observatory of the size of the Earth.
"I could not imagine living with the telescopic image of a black hole," said Jean-Pierre Luminet of the National Center for Scientific Research, who created the first visualization of a black hole in 1979. The astronomer Yale Priya Natarajan was more succinct. "My first reaction to seeing the picture was: Wow!"
The remarkable snapshot shows a monster black hole located 55 million light-years from Earth in the neighboring M87 galaxy. Nicknamed Pōwehi (pronounced poe-vay-hee), Hawaiian mythology word meaning "dark source embellished with endless creation", the object is 6.5 billion times the enormous weight of the sun and has a diameter of 24 billion kilometers. Its powerful mass and gravity cast a shadow over the hot, shiny gas that swirls around it, creating a distinct donut shape.
The Event Horizon Telescope project is the culmination of a century of speculation about black holes, collapsed masses in which gravity is so intense that no matter how light or even light can escape. Until now, scientists interested in understanding these riddles could only study them indirectly: testing theories using computer simulations or observing how the intense gravity of black holes affected matter and space. surrounded them. Now, objects are visibly, almost concretely real.
In addition, the first image of a black hole heralds a new era of physics. Now that they can observe these weird objects directly, experts say we can expect an avalanche of new observations – and new cosmic discoveries.
Einstein continues to do the tests
One of the most striking aspects of Pōwehi's image is its resemblance to simulated black holes created using computer models. These models are all based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, making this match an impressive justification for the ideas of the famous physicist.
"We were surprised by the clarity of the signature," Doeleman told NBC News MACH in an email. "Einstein's theory of gravity predicts that we should see a ring of light, but to make it pass so clearly has rocked us on our heels." (A small irony: Einstein himself did not believe in black holes, claiming that equations indicated that such objects were theoretically possible, they "do not exist in physical reality.")
The bright ring around Pōwehi is clearly asymmetrical, another effect predicted. The gases around the black hole gravitate into orbit and the side that turns towards the Earth seems brighter than the one that moves away. The pattern indicates that the black hole is turning clockwise from our point of view, said Heino Falcke, radio astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a member of the team Event Horizon Telescope, in an email.
The photo does not reveal what is happening on the horizon of events, the theoretical "surface" of a black hole. The horizon of events is one of the strangest predictions of Einstein's relativity, the point of no return where time stops. Until now, Horizon telescope observations of events can not confirm the very existence of a horizon of events.
"It sounds like an event horizon and it whistles like an event horizon, but you can never exclude something that almost looks like a horizon of events producing a similar shadow," he said. said Falcke. "Every competing model has to be tested one by one. The interesting thing is – now we can. "
Towards the distorted space … and beyond
The amazing power of the Event Horizon telescope means that many other outstanding issues in astronomy become suddenly indebted.
"This gives us, for the first time, a way to test our predictions of how black holes digest material and throw powerful jets of material that can disrupt entire galaxies," Doeleman said. These jets can reach 100,000,000 times the width of the black hole and no one knows exactly how they are formed.
The regions surrounding the black holes are also extreme places where the gas is heated to millions of degrees and spinning at a speed close to that of light. These are natural laboratories for testing the outer limits of the laws of physics. "The next step is to make the image sharper so we can study the dynamics of the black hole – how does it change, how does it affect the environment?" This will allow us to move from creating still images of black holes to making movies, "said Doeleman.
Pōwehi is only one of the billions of supermassive black holes that are thought to be present today that they exist throughout the universe, at the center of most major galaxies. Future upgrades of the Event Horizon telescope will see more of these objects, including Sagittarius A * (pronounced Sagittarius A star), the huge black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Falcke and the rest of the team have already tried to see Sagittarius A *, but our local black hole is flashing quickly, making it what he calls "an additional challenge".
The Horizon Telescope will be a boon for many other types of astronomical observations beyond black holes.
"The resolution power of the telescope is simply amazing," Rice University astronomers Mustafa Amin and Andrea Isella said in an email. (Its acuteness equates to reading e-mails on an iPhone in New York while basking in a Paris cafe.) They are eager to exploit this power to observe the planets being formed around the world. other stars or to observe the delicate structures of distant galaxies.
The possibilities are almost endless. First of all, Falcke and the other black hole hounds are looking forward to a well deserved sleep. "People were exhausted to do this tremendous amount of work under this pressure," he said. "It would be really nice to take a break for a moment and rethink the way we do things."
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