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DENVER – Last week, the Horizon Event Telescope (EHT) released the very first image of the shadow of a black hole projected against the hot gas of its accretion disk. This image of the black hole in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy (M87) made headlines around the world. Soon, the EHT will produce the first film of this hot gas swirling in a chaotic manner around the shadows, said project officials who spoke on Sunday (April 14) at the meeting. April of the American Physical Society.
The EHT is not a single telescope. On the contrary, it is a radio telescope network from around the world that simultaneously records accurate and synchronized wave recordings. These recordings can be combined so that the different telescopes act in one. Shep Doeleman, the astronomer at Harvard University who is leading the EHT project, said the detail of the images is expected to increase dramatically as individual radio telescopes join the EHT and as the team updates the project registration technology. And then, the team should be able to produce black hole films in action, he said.
"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]"And then, if we had a lot more stations, we could really start seeing real-time movies about black hole growth and rotation." [9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind]
In the case of the black hole in the M87, Doeleman told Live Science that after his presentation, making a movie would be rather simple. The black hole is huge, even for a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy: it represents 6.5 billion times the mass of the Earth's sun, with its horizon of events – the point in the world. beyond which even light can not return – surrounding a sphere as wide as our entire solar system. The hot material of the accretion disk of this black hole therefore takes a long time to make a single trip around the object.
"The time scale over which [M87] changes is significantly greater than a day. It's great, "said Doeleman, because it means that the EHT must shoot a movie of the object one frame at a time.
"We can … make our image, then, if we want to do another, or an accelerated film, we just go out the next day or week, and we could do it seven weeks in a row and get seven images from a movie and then see something kind of moving that way, "he said
But the M87 black hole is not the only supermassive black hole observed by the EHT. The team is also looking at Sagittarius A *, the supermassive black hole in the center of our own galaxy, and plans to publish the first image of this object soon. And ISE researchers also want to make movies from this black hole much closer and better studied, but this project will be more complicated, Doeleman said. [11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy]
SagA * is about 1,000 times less massive than the black hole of the M87, says Doeleman. The image changes 1,000 times faster.
"So that means it's going to change in minutes or hours," Doeleman said. "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 while shooting."
To make a film, the EHT will not only have to collect all the data needed to create an image of the black hole, but also divide this data into several parts over time. Then, the team compared these pieces with each other using sophisticated algorithms to understand how the image changed even when it was captured.
"We have to find a way to look at the first little bit of data, then the second bit of data, and then make a movie," he said. "So our team members are working on what we call dynamic imaging."
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. So, for example, you can say: "OK, you can move but you can not go that far."
By using these types of constraints, the team can convert even minute amounts of data from one minute to the next into complete images of SagA * in motion. As a result, the team plans to shoot movies of the smallest black hole in one night.
According to Avery Broderick, an astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who works on the interpretation of ISE images, these films should reveal new details about the behavior of accretion disks around black holes, including the how they engulf the matter.
"We will be able to map space spaces by looking at the black hole cinema, not the portrait," Broderick said.
Originally published on Science live.
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