A supermassive black hole is a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time. On Thursday, astronomers announced that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole. Astronomers believe that this is the first image of a black
Dr. Ozel is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which is a group effort involving over 300 researchers from 13 different institutions. Together, they oversee the operation of an ever-expanding global network of telescopes that come together to form a single enormous telescope that is as big as the planet Earth. The findings of the research were presented in a letter that was published in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday.
A picture of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87, often known as M87, was taken by the same team in 2019. This photograph, which was the very first one ever taken of a black hole, may now be found permanently displayed at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. An astronomer who worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics named Sheperd Doeleman made the following statement at the time: “We have seen what we believed was ‘unseeable.'”
The new finding, according to astronomers, will lead to a better understanding of gravity, the evolution of galaxies, and how even placid-appearing clouds of stars, such as our own majestic pinwheel of stars, the Milky Way, can generate quasars, which are enormous geysers of energy that can be seen across the universe.
Einstein’s finding led to a new view of the universe, in which space-time may tremble, bend, tear, expand, spiral, and even vanish forever into the jaws of a black hole. A black hole is an object whose gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from its grasp.
This theory was rejected by Einstein, however it is now accepted that there are black holes dispersed across the cosmos. There are many fragments left behind from dead stars that have collapsed in on themselves and are still moving forward.
However, it seems that in the core of practically every galaxy, including our own, there is a black hole that is hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of times more massive than our sun. Astronomers are not yet able to explain how these supermassive black holes managed to develop to such enormous sizes.
It is a mystery as to what caused such enormous emptiness to come into being. Do the original energy of the Big Bang include any creases of a dense nature? In the early years of the cosmos, were there giant runaway stars that eventually imploded and destroyed everything in their immediate vicinity?
Since then, astronomers have been working hard to improve the resolution of their telescopes in the hopes of resolving the shadow cast by that orange. However, ionised electrons and protons in interstellar space scatter the radio waves, turning them into a muddle that obscures the source’s specific characteristics. Recent comments made by Dr. Doeleman describe the experience as “seeing through shower glass.”
Researchers required the ability to adjust their radio telescopes to shorter wavelengths that could see through the haze in order to view further into the black hole shadow. In addition to that, they need a more powerful telescope.
In 2009, Dr. Doeleman and his colleagues established the Event Horizon Telescope, which takes its name from the region around a black hole that is incapable of being escaped. The international research endeavour now makes use of eleven distinct radio telescopes located in various parts of the globe.
The group achieved its first significant success in April 2019, when it revealed a photograph of the M87 black hole to the public. In the year 2021, members of the team revised their data, which showed that magnetic fields were spinning around the black hole like a beautifully grooved rifle barrel, propelling matter and energy into the abyss.
However, not everything is ideal. According to the results of the computer models, the black hole ought to be louder and subject to greater turbulent activity. Priya Natarajan, an astronomer at Yale University who researches the development of black holes and galaxies, expressed her belief that “something is missing.”
The next objective for Dr. Doeleman is to broaden the coverage of the network by adding more antennas, with the end aim of filming the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The difficulty that will face filmmakers attempting to depict black holes will be in differentiating the fundamental structure of the black hole from the motion of the stuff that is contained inside it.
The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics and a black hole researcher at Caltech, Kip Thorne, recently said that he was anxiously anticipating trustworthy videos of the gas flow surrounding the black hole.
Janna Levin, a gravitational theorist at Barnard College of Columbia University who was not involved in the experiment, agreed that the discoveries had the potential to be stunning as well as helpful. “I’m not bored with photographs of black holes yet,” she added. “I’m not bored with pictures of black holes.”
