Edge of Black Hole Would Reveal If Einstein Were Correct
If they have succeeded we may just be on the verge of seeing an elusive black holes edge, which would reveal if the fundamentals of general relativity do hold fast under some of the most extreme of conditions. However, there is some bad news, and this is that there is going to be a long wait to find out if the worldwide telescope network actually managed to capture an image.
Astronomers around the globe have completed five long nights of watching two black holes and data to the tune of 1,024 hard drives will come from the Event Horizon Telescope processing center at MIT Haystack along with the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Only then will scientists and astronomers be able to study them to find out if an image has been captured.
The biggest challenge is that the hard drives from the South Pole Telescope are not going to be flown out until October, at the close of winter. This means that it isn’t going be until late on this year, or possibly 2018 until the answers are revealed, so there is a long on the edge of the seat wait.
Photographs Would Turn Black Hole from Mythical to Concrete
Heino Falcke is one of the astronomers involved in the project from Radboud University in the Netherlands. He said that even though data hasn’t been seen, any observations of black holes is going to take them from being mythical objects and turn them into something concrete that scientists and astronomers can study.
He went on to say even if the first photos that came out turned out to not be up to much and were washed out, it would allow scientists to test, for the first time, some of Einstein’s basic prediction of the theory of gravity in such an extreme environment as that of a black hole.
Black holes have been one of the most elusive and fascinating objects throughout the universe. Even though they have long been suspected of lurking within the center of most galaxies, no one has been able to take a photograph to prove they are real.
The name, of course, gives some clues, black holes, are extremely dark and they are massive, so big in fact that they consume everything that goes past their event horizon, this includes light, which has in the past made it impossible for scientists and astronomers to photograph.
A Collection of Telescopes Hope to Capture Event Horizon of Black Hole
Instead of using only one telescope, in this latest attempt to capture it on film, the international teams used a network of radio telescopes which had been placed around the planet, including the US, South Pole, Chile and the French Alps. Together they are known as Event Horizon Telescope.
They work thanks to a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, aka VLBI. This means the large network of receivers is all able to focus on radio waves that are emitted by a particular object in space at any one time. In this case, it was Sagittarius A, the black hole found in the middle of the Milky Way, along with another which is in the middle of galaxy M87.
The telescopes, when combined, can reach a resolution of 50 microarcseconds, which is the same as being able to see a grapefruit if it was on the moon’s surface. It is hoped that this is going to be ample to capture an image of the event horizon of Sagittarius A, 20 million km across, which is barely just a pinprick in the night sky, a distance of 26,000 light-years away from the Earth.
Was Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Correct?
While the telescope had been given the approval to be turned on for ten days, bad weather conditions meant that five nights were only available to the researchers. What will be revealed if the project has been successful will all depend on whether Einstein was correct? Researchers have said that the black hole should look like a bright ring of light around the dark blob. With light coming from gas and dust particles having accelerated to high speed before then being ripped apart and finally consumed by the black hole. The blob would be a shadow that would be cast over the chaos.
What would be even more impressive would be if the scientists are able to measure the dark shadow that is cast by the black hole. Scientists have warned that they may see something else entirely and if so the theory of general relativity of Einstein would have to be overhauled completely.
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