“We hope to get that very soon,” said Doeleman. The collaboration is still working on producing an image of the Milky Way’s black hole. The second target, which yielded the image, was a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, into which the equivalent of 6bn suns of light and matter has disappeared. First was Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which has a mass of about 4m suns. When observations were launched in 2017, the EHT had two primary targets. The EHT achieved the necessary firepower by combining data from eight of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (Alma) in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, creating an effective telescope the size of the Earth. This was once thought to be an insurmountable challenge. A lot of this material is destined for oblivion, although some of it is ejected as powerful jets of radiation.īut black holes are so small, dark and distant that observing them directly requires a telescope with a resolution equivalent to being able to see a bagel on the moon. This is the point at which escaping would require something to travel at faster than the speed of light – which as far as we know nothing does – so it is the point of no return.īlack holes are surrounded by an accretion disk of dust and gas, orbiting at close to the speed of light.
The edge of the black hole is defined by its so-called event horizon. The equations predicted that, beyond a certain threshold, when too much matter or energy is concentrated in one place, space and time collapse, leaving behind a sinkhole through which light and matter can enter but not escape.Īt first these were thought to be mathematical oddities, rather than real astronomical objects, but in the past century overwhelming evidence has confirmed that black holes are out there.
Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which reimagined gravity as the warping of space and time by matter and energy.
0 kommentar(er)
