Perhaps on April 10 we will see for the first time the shadow of a supermassive black hole.
Perhaps in a week and a half, scientists will present a photo of the century – the most detailed image of a black hole for today, or rather its shadow. On april 10, 2019, in six cities of five countries of the world (Belgium, Chile, China, Japan and the United States) at the same time will be held press conferences on the results of extreme importance, which were obtained in the framework of the project Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), says the announcement on the website of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
One of the fundamental predictions of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is the existence of black holes. Despite the recent discovery of gravitational waves from the confluence of such objects, direct evidence using electromagnetic waves remains elusive, and astronomers continue to search for them using radio telescopes, creating international research projects such as EHT, whose main purpose is to directly observe the black hole environment with an angular resolution comparable to the event horizon.
The EHT targets are a supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which resides in the center of the Milky Way and exceeds the Sun by 4 million times in mass, and an even larger “gravitational monster” in the heart of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years distant from us .
One of the main conditions for obtaining a detailed picture of a black hole is the presence of a very large telescope, for example, the size of the Earth. Of course, no one will finance the creation of a tool of this size. As a result, the best solution was to combine several telescopes located at a great distance from each other. Using this method, we will be able to observe objects with much higher accuracy, actually getting a telescope the size of a planet!
-Farial Osel, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Arizona (USA)
EHT leverages the power of many radio telescopes located around the world, including in Chile, Arizona, Hawaii, Antarctica and Greenland. These tools work together, which allows them to obtain images of the highest resolution than each of them could achieve individually.
In total, in 2017 and 2018, the “Earth-sized array” performed about 60 hours of observations, collecting a total of about 10 petabytes of data. Scientists spent a year and a half to calibrate and double-check a huge amount of information and, as a result, convert it into an image of the source.
Most detailed image of a black hole will be presented on April 10th
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