The world, it seems, is soon to see the first picture of a black hole.
On Wednesday, astronomers across the globe are to hold “six major press conferences” simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope, which was designed precisely for that purpose.
It has been a long wait.
Photo: Reuters / NASA
Of all the forces or objects in the universe that we cannot see — including dark energy and dark matter — none has frustrated human curiosity as much as the invisible maws that shred and swallow stars.
Astronomers began speculating about these omnivorous “dark stars” in the 1700s, and since then indirect evidence has slowly accumulated.
“More than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the center of our galaxy,” said Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency and an expert on black holes. “It has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly — as fast as 20 years.”
To put that in perspective, our solar system takes about 230 million years to circle the center of the Milky Way.
Eventually, astronomers speculated that these bright spots were in fact “black holes” — a term coined by US physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the mid-1960s — surrounded by a swirling band of white-hot gas and plasma.
At the inner edge of these luminous accretion disks, things abruptly go dark.
“The event horizon” — or the point of no return — “is not a physical barrier, you couldn’t stand on it,” McNamara said. “If you’re on the inside of it, you can’t escape because you would need infinite energy, and if you are on the other side, you can — in principle.”
The telescope that collected the data for the first-ever image is unlike any ever devised.
“Instead of constructing a giant telescope — which would collapse under its own weight — we combined several observatories as if they were fragments of a giant mirror,” said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric Radio Astronomy in Grenoble, France.
In April 2017, eight such radio telescopes scattered across the globe — in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile and the South Pole — were trained on two black holes in different corners of the universe to collect data.
Studies that could be unveiled next week are likely to zoom in on one or the other.
Oddsmakers favor Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our elliptical galaxy that first caught the eye of astronomers.
Sag A* has 4 million times the mass of our sun, which means that the black hole it generates is about 44 million kilometers across.
That might sound like a big target, but for the telescope array on Earth about 26,000 light-years (245 trillion kilometers) away, it is like trying to photograph a golf ball on the moon.
The other candidate is a monster black hole — 1,500 times more massive even than Sag A* — in an elliptical galaxy known as M87. It is also a lot farther from Earth, but distance and size balance out, making it about as difficult to pinpoint.
The data collected by the far-flung telescope array still had to be collected and collated.
“The imaging algorithms we developed fill the gaps of data we are missing in order to reconstruct a picture of a black hole,” the team said on their Web site.
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