First-ever photo of black hole may be coming within days

First-ever photo of black hole may be coming within days
"Groundbreaking result" of astronomers' long effort to photograph a black hole to be unveiled April 10.
A simulated image shows the turbulent plasma in the extreme environment around a supermassive black hole.University of Arizona
April 4, 2019, 12:26 PM MDT
By David Freeman https://www.nbcnews.com

Humanity could be days away from seeing the first-ever photograph of a black hole.



We've seen countless illustrations and simulations of black holes in recent years but never an actual close-up photo of one. That could change Wednesday, when scientists will gather in six simultaneous press briefings around the world to unveil the "groundbreaking result" of a yearslong effort to capture images of the black holes at the centers of our Milky Way galaxy and a neighboring galaxy.

The U.S. press briefing will be held at 9 a.m. Eastern at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and will be livestreamed. It will be hosted by the National Science Foundation and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration that's been working to photograph a black hole using eight linked radio observatories around the world to form a single Earth-size telescope.

The scientists involved in the effort declined to discuss the result in advance of the press events, which will be held in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Tokyo and Tapei as well as Washington. But the result is believed to be based upon a vast trove of data from observations made in April 2017 of Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), the supermassive black hole lying 26,000 light-years from Earth at the center of the Milky Way, and another supermassive black hole at the center of the neighboring Virgo A galaxy.



Black holes are super-dense remnants of collapsed stars whose gravitational forces are so intense that not even light can escape. But if black holes themselves are completely black — invisible — scientists believe that radio waves given off by the gas and dust swirling around them are visible through a sufficiently powerful telescope.

What might that look like in a photo? Physicists have hypothesized that it might look like a dark area over a bright background — essentially the "shadow" of the black hole projected onto the matter swirling around it.

"They have always aspired to image a black hole "shadow," and the best bet is that they have accomplished this feat," Roger Blandford, a Stanford University astrophysicist who is not part of the EHT collaboration, told NBC News MACH in an email. "You can think of a black hole as being like a hand lens on which you have painted a black disk. What you see depends upon what is shining behind and around it."

Blandford said he would be listening in on the briefing, adding that he would be "thrilled" to see an image of a black hole. "When I first got interested in black holes as a student, I never imagined that such a feat would be possible."

Astronomers can see black holes as the material they accumulate is extremely hot, so it appears very bright. However, we currently have no decent image of a black hole or its event horizon because the resolution of the images is not high enough and it just appears as a bright blur. It is hoped the EHT will change this, providing researchers with a clear image showing the event horizon ring and the shadow of the black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87 l

In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes’ event horizons, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light can’t escape. After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April.

On Wednesday (April 10) at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) the The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international effort that aims to capture the first-ever image of a black hole, will announce a "groundbreaking result" at a news conference.

Over the observation period, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team collected a petabyte of data. This was then distributed to two research institutions—MIT Haystack Observatory in the U.S. and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. The data were then processed by supercomputers.

The event will be streamed live here: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/

Another article...

https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-2019-4

Earth just saw its first glimpse of a black hole. This University of Illinois professor looked into the black hole's abyss.
Ally Marotti  | MSN |1 hr ago



Earth saw its first image of a black hole Wednesday, and a University of Illinois professor led a team that helped interpret the data used to create it.

The picture, released first in a scientific journal, shows a supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which can be seen in the Virgo constellation through a telescope from Earth. The data used to create the image could help scientists better understand gravity and other phenomena, said Charles Gammie, an astronomy and physics professor at the University of Illinois.

The experiment was called the Event Horizon Telescope, named for the event horizon, or the edge of the black hole, Gammie said. It took more than 200 researchers and eight telescopes around the world to create the picture.

The image itself looks a little like a fuzzy, glowing, orange doughnut. The black hole is in the center.

“What we’re seeing is light from the stuff that’s falling into the black hole,” said Gammie, a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council. “As it’s on its way in, it gets heated up to tremendously high temperatures (and it glows) … The gravitational pull bends the light into this sphere shape.”

That intense gravitational field is also part of what makes it so hard to capture an image of the cosmic bodies. Black holes, often created by the death of massive stars and found at the centers of galaxies, have enormous masses but compact sizes. The gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape.

This breakthrough has given scientists a window into the mysterious abyss of black holes.

Gammie led a team that published one of six papers released with the image Wednesday. His team, which included graduate students, built computer simulations of the black hole to interpret some of the data the Event Horizon telescopes brought in.

One aspect Gammie’s team honed in on was how black holes interact with their environments. Almost every galaxy in the universe has a black hole at its center, including our Milky Way, he said. Some have jets coming out of the center, almost like electromagnetic waves.

His team’s models found that the jets are generated only if a black hole is spinning.

“You have all this energy stored in the black hole. It’s spinning around and dragging all this space with it,” Gammie said. “If you can tap into that like a flywheel, you can get the energy out and it goes into the jet.”

With this breakthrough out to the public, the science world has a lot of work ahead, Gammie said. There is still data to be analyzed, and the telescopes are being upgraded to deliver clearer pictures of the Messier 87 galaxy. There is even talk of putting a telescope in space to extend the reach of the network, he said.

“We found some really cool things,” Gammie said. And this is just the beginning.