Scientists just days away from unveiling first ever photograph of a black hole

A Nasa artist's concept illustration shows a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun.
REUTERS
Bonnie Christian8 April 2019

The first ever photograph of a black hole is just days away from being unveiled.

Scientists are expected to release the first real picture of a black hole, in what will be a breakthrough in astrophysics, captured by the first run of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

The EHT project was formed in 2012 and uses dozens of observatories to scan the environment directly around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

The results will be released on Wednesday in six press conferences across the world, heralding a breakthrough in humanity's understanding of the universe.

Dr Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency, told AFP: "More than 50 years ago, scientists saw there was something very bright at the centre of our galaxy."

European Southern Observatory shows an image taken by an exquisitely sensitive Gravity instrument which has added further evidence to the long-standing assumption that a supermassive black hole lurks in the centre of the Milky Way.
AFP/Getty Images

This mysteriously bright object was very dense and had a "gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly - as fast as 20 years", he added.

A black hole's event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust, all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light - gets sucked in irretrievably.

The research will put to the test a scientific pillar - physicist Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, put forward in 1915, which was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.

The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes.

An artist's impression showing how a very distant quasar powered by a supermassive black hole may look close up.
PA

The first - called Sagittarius A* - is situated at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth.

The second - called M87 - resides at the centre of the neighbouring Virgo A galaxy, with a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light-years away from Earth.

Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are extraordinarily dense entities formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle.

Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation and perhaps merging with other black holes.

University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, project scientist for the EHT described a black hole as "an extreme warp in spacetime," a term referring to the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time joined into a single four-dimensional continuum.

The scientists also will be trying to detect for the first time the dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds before being swallowed into oblivion.

The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light - radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole.

Einstein's theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole.

"The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein's theory," Dr Psaltis said. "If we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, 'Clearly, something is not exactly right.'"

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