“The friction and the high velocities of material forming out of a black hole naturally produces X-rays,” Peter Edmonds, a NASA astrophysicist and communications specialist working with Chandra, said. Some of the best indirect images of black holes come from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. “If we know of no other astrophysical object that can be so massive and so dark as what we just measured, we consider this as very strong evidence that a black hole lies there.” We do have indirect images of black holes, however “We typically measure the orbits of stars and gas that seem to circle around very dark ‘spots’ in the sky and measure how much mass is there in that dark spot,” Psaltis says. Instead, they look for evidence of the effects of a black hole’s gravity and radiation. That’s why when hunting for black holes, astronomers don’t usually try for direct observation. What’s more, because of their strong gravity, black holes tend to be surrounded by other bright matter that makes it hard to see the object itself. “And taking a picture of it would be equivalent to taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the moon.” “The largest one in the sky the black hole in the center of the Milky Way,” Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, explained in an email. The biggest problem with trying to see a black hole is that even the supermassive ones (with masses millions of times heavier than our sun) are relatively tiny. Astronomers also speculate that some black holes may have been formed in the early chaotic universe after the Big Bang. Why no astronomer has ever seen a black hole with a telescopeīlack holes are born when massive stars collapse in on themselves and create a region of gravity so intense that not even light can escape its grasp. Because as massive black holes are, they’re actually incredibly hard to see up close. The National Science Foundation is describing the results as “groundbreaking.” And if an image is produced, it will be a remarkable accomplishment. On April 10, a collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope is set to announce the results of an effort to capture an image of the supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy. We’ve “heard” them, so to speak, as scientists have recorded the gravitational waves (literal ripples in spacetime) emanating from black holes that collided with one another billions of years ago.īut any photo you’ve seen of a dark mass warping spacetime … well, that’s just an illustration. Nothing can escape one, not even light.Įven though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one. Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. You can see it here, and learn more about how this historic image was made. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Update : In April 2019, scientists published the first-ever image of a black hole. Things are calm out here.”įollow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. “We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things move fast,” Ghez said in an interview. It’s “like an urban downtown, everything is more extreme. National Science Foundation.Įven though it is quieter than expected, the center of the Milky Way is an important place to study, Ghez said. The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. The next step is a movie of one of those two black holes, maybe both, Fish said. To get the picture, the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Īstronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the new images.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |