[ad_1]
DENVER – You saw the first close-up of a black hole. Now, get ready to see the faint traces of matter surrounding the object.
The international team responsible for the very first image of the shadow of a black hole is already considering taking a better, more detailed picture. And this image could reveal new details about the matter and the magnetic fields wrapped around the supermassive distant object in the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy.
More detailed images, as well as some black hole movies already underway, could help explain how black holes engulf the hot gas ring material swirling around them (called accretion disks) and how the objects produce jets of super-fast material at the scale of galaxies. That's what researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team who spoke to a host of physicists at the April meeting of the American Physical Society said. [9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind]
To further describe the black hole of the M87, researchers must change their approach, said Shep Doeleman, the Harvard University astronomer, head of the EHT team. Specifically, scientists must increase the frequency of the radio waves studied and add new radio telescopes to the EHT network. Both projects are already underway, he said, and should refine the already remarkably clear picture. (The existing image is really remarkably clear if you consider that the supermassive object in question is so far apart that, seen from the Earth, it does not seem bigger than an orange on the surface of the Moon.)
Avery Broderick, an astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, works on the interpretation of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) data. . The shapes of these tripods should tell physicists if a long-standing theory about how matter is projected from the accretion disk of a black hole in its throat is correct.
"One of the stories we tell our graduate students is that" magneto-rotational instability "causes accretion", or the process by which black holes suck up gas nearby. said Broderick.
Physicists think, he explained to Live Science after the conference, that when turbulence shakes the burning material of the accretion disk, its trembling particles cling beautifully over great distances. This magnetic pull causes the slowing down of some swirling materials and their falling out of orbit beyond the event horizon and into the black hole; This material constitutes the thread that the researchers hope to study.
"But it's largely a story born of ignorance and a lack of imagination," Broderick told the crowd during his speech, "because we do not know what's wrong." Another could do it, and we tried to find alternative explanations.
A more detailed picture could confirm or reject this theory, he said.
"What these evils would do is that they would give you a way to test that directly, because you're looking at [the direct result of magnetic turbulence]," he said.
Careful imaging of the tracks, combined with a moving black hole imaging effort, would help physicists understand, with unprecedented detail, how black holes eat and grow, Broderick said.
At the same time, better images of the lighter material around the black hole could reveal structures that could help the team explain these jets of matter, Doeleman told Live Science. The researchers hope to capture images of the material turning away from the accretion disk forward, almost in the direction of the Earth, following the true trajectory of the M87 shining jet.
"We opened a window and we have not finished looking through," he said. "Stay tuned."
Originally published on Science live.
[ad_2]
Source link