Astronomers may have finally stepped over a historic threshold and managed to capture the first ever image of a black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a giant project, which includes an array of powerful radio observatories around the world. When turned on simultaneously and
connected, they function as a single virtual telescope with a diameter of approximately 9977 kilometers. This telescope was pointed at two heavenly bodies in the sky – Sagittarius A*, The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, and another black hole at the center of the nearby M87 galaxy.
According to research team member Heino Falcke from Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, even if the first images are grainy and washed out, it still allows astronomers to test some basic predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity near a black hole for the first time. The photo “Will turn black holes from some mythical object to something concrete that we can study,” he said.
Yet, Despite successfully gathering data over the past week, the results will remain unknown for the next few months. The scientists will have to comb through around 500TB of data from each observatory, divided into 1,024 hard drives.
And since none of the observatories can process that amount of data locally, the hard drives will have to be flown to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. Here, supercomputers will crunch the data at a much faster rate, but the team is still likely to only know for sure if it captured an image of the black hole by early 2018.
Of course, Don’t expect to see anything similar to the colourful artists’ renditions we’re used to connecting black holes to in our heads. Instead, The image will be closer to what you’ve laid eyes on if you’ve seen Interstellar. Based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, light will bend around the edges of the black hole, instead showing us only a halo of light reflecting off gas and dust, accumulated around a black circle. However, the achievement is still monumental, one that’s expected to further a variety of space-related research over at least the next decade.