The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team plans to release clearer images next year of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), as well as dynamic images of another black hole in the center of our galaxy, an Academia Sinica researcher said yesterday.
The international team in April last year released the first-ever image of the black hole at the center of M87, an image derived in 2017 through a virtual Earth-size telescope that involved eight arrays.
Academia Sinica researchers helped operate three of the arrays, including the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Sub-Millimeter Array in Hawaii, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.
Photo courtesy of Chen Ming-tang
Having lived in Hawaii since 2002 to operate telescopes, Chen Ming-tang (陳明堂), a research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics said that the EHT team plans to publish clearer images of the M87 black hole next year.
After the Greenland Telescope, a project led by the institute, joined the EHT in 2018, they have derived clearer images of the M87 black hole, which would allow scientists to study its changes in more depth, he said.
The team also plans to release the images of another smaller black hole in the Sagittarius A* region at the center of our galaxy, which were captured in 2017, Chen said, adding that processing the data is time-consuming.
Photo provided by Discovery
The movement of the smaller black hole, which has only a one-1000th the mass of the M87 black hole, could be more easily observed with current technology, Chen said.
He is glad to see this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to black hole researchers, after the Nobel committee in 2017 recognized the research on gravitational waves, a phenomenon pertinent to black holes, Chen said, adding that Taiwan is also playing a part in the global pursuit of black hole mysteries.
Asked about the researchers’ next step, Chen said that he hopes to relocate the Greenland Telescope from its position at the Thule Air Base to a better location atop a 3,200m peak on the Greenland ice sheet, a goal announced by the institute in 2018.
However, there is little progress so far due to travel restrictions under the impact of COVID-19 and a lack of funding, Chen said.
Ministry of Science and Technology data showed that it has allocated an annual average of NT$100 million (US$3.45 million) over the past five years to support projects related to black hole observations.
Relocating the telescope would require US$25 million to move the telescope and an annual spending of US$4 million for maintenance at the remote location, the data showed.
Academia Sinica said it would continue to promote research on black holes and it is looking forward to the next scientific breakthroughs.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS