![]() ![]() The eight observatories that created the Event Horizon Telescope He studied a radio astronomy technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), where several telescopes, located thousands of miles apart, simultaneously observe the same celestial object to emulate a telescope as large as the distance between them. Sheperd Doeleman is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. While that won’t happen anytime soon, or ever, one scientist envisioned a hack. To get a high enough resolution and see whether that donut is glazed or custard-filled, would require a telescope the size of the Earth. The magnifying power of a telescope is limited by the size of its dish. Yet looking at either of these objects through a telescope is much like trying to photograph a donut on the moon. Measuring 24 billion miles across and six and a half billion times the mass of our sun (what?), it is one of the largest known black holes. There are also gargantuan black holes, like the one in the Messier 87 galaxy. A cosmic spitting distance of 26,000 light-years from Earth, it would take a space probe, like Voyager 1, more than 400 million years to get there. The nearest supermassive black hole is Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which resides at the galactic center of the Milky Way. The real problem with imaging black holes isn’t just their blackness or their glow. A black hole has never actually been seen. And scientists have calculated that one should be able to see the terrifying border where photons still orbit the black hole and the point where nothing can escape it: the event horizon.īut that’s theory. Paradoxically, black holes are also some of the most luminous objects in the sky. And as matter turbulently rubs against itself, it heats to billions of degrees and glows. All that hot gas and stardust trying to squeeze into a dense point create a lot of friction. There are other clues to locating a black hole. For example, the black hole at the center of our galaxy makes its surrounding stars look like bacteria in a petri dish. Over the years, astrophysicists and mathematicians have found Nobel-prize-worthy ways to detect black holes by looking at how they govern star orbits around them. Yet scientists are never too impressed by the impossible. With everything pulled into their gravitational field, they don’t emit anything our instruments can detect. Space photography has come a long way, but black holes are invisible to the human eye. They may be superabundant, but they’re not easy to find. Yet 100 years after Einstein’s groundbreaking theory, astronomers estimate there are more than 40 quintillion (yes, that’s 40,000,000,000,000,000,000) black holes in the observable universe. Objects infinitely dense, like squeezing the mass of the Earth into the size of a coin.Įven Einstein, whose general theory of relativity predicted the existence of black holes, found the idea so radical and improbable that he was doubtful black holes existed. ![]() It’s hard to wrap our heads around the concept of black holes. So bizarre, time may come to its abrupt end inside. Like an infinite well of gravity, they are a region of spacetime where so much mass condenses into such a tiny space that gravity overcomes all known forces. ![]() Black holes: hurly-burly engines in our universe It is an age where Moore’s Law, machine learning, and eventually quantum computers may uncover one of the universe’s weirdest and most enigmatic objects. Just as fuzzy, but no less seminal, these two images are part of a black hole golden age. Just a few months ago, that same team released a much anticipated second image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. It is an illustration of what we think black holes look like, based on mathematical theory and fairly recent evidence that black holes exist.Īll of this changed in 2019 when a team of scientists used a decades-old astronomy technique, remarkable global collaboration, and advancements in data storage and computing technology to create the first-ever image of a black hole. Since 2015, Western Digital has been supporting the Event Horizon Telescope, a groundbreaking virtual telescope observing and imaging black holes.Īlmost every image we’ve seen of a black hole isn’t an image at all. ![]()
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