First photo of a Black Hole to be released tomorrow

Tomorrow there will be a press conference held by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and that promises to revolutionize the vision of our world. The network of telescopes counts on the union of several scientists, mainly astronomers and astrophysicists, and its main mission is to try to capture images and observe formations of black holes. Exactly for this reason what is expected is that in this press conference the first photo of a black hole ever taken in history be revealed.

What is a black hole?

Black holes are a warp in space-time. These heavenly bodies are incredibly dense and one of the aspects that most calls attention is the fact that nothing that passes through it can “escape”. Anything, be it a planet, gases, dust, light and even radiation, ends up being sucked into it and there is no way out. Before, it was believed that it could not reflect the light it sucked, hence the denomination “black” of its interior. However, there is currently a theory that states that they can emit radiation. The subject is so talked about that it has even become tema of successful movies.

Today there is evidence that proves the existence of these black holes, including radiation that is emitted from their interior, but there is still no image or record of one. Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, states that:

“The black hole event horizon represents the limits of our knowledge. To me, (the Event Horizon Telescope) is almost an accurate piece of what the human mind is capable of. I’m having an emotionally excited reaction to all of this.”

Multiple telescopes in one

A EHT in fact, it doesn't use just one telescope to get this image, but several, which are positioned around the world. They are all pointed in the same direction, always looking at the same object. This technique makes it possible to produce an image with an incredibly higher resolution than if it were done with just a telescope. This principle is called Long Baseline Interferometry.

In short, the Earth becomes a big telescope and this ensures that this image can have impressive resolution and important levels of detail. The idea is that this principle makes it possible to record the center of the galaxy, which has a distance of 25 thousand light years. He currently has two points of interest that are the target of observations.

The first is the Sagittarius A*, One region that emits waves of radio and that is pontine of interest for if opinion with a massive black hole with mass four M times greater than the mass of the Sol. The second is the center of galaxy M87, also a place where it is possible that there is an even more massive black hole, with sete billion times the mass of Sol.

A Press conference

It is not yet possible to know what will be shown at the press conference, but the expectation is that it will reveal the image of a shadow formed by a black hole in the cosmos. It will take place in several different cities and simultaneously as Washington, Bruxelas, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei e Tokyo.

Regardless of what is shown, if it will in fact be a black hole or not, the promise is that it will be something that will revolutionize the way scientists will develop their next lines of research on the subject.

Grant Tremblay, astrophysicist of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated that if the image is, in fact, of the black hole's shadow, it would be incredibly important and "completely jaw-dropping".

"If we see a shadow as we think we will, it will be very exciting, a confirmation that while we don't know how nature works, we are on the right track."

There is an image released last year by an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Avery Broderick, which simulates what it would be like to observe a black hole by the EHT.

The press conference can be watched Live on a streaming from the National Science Foundation website and will start tomorrow, April 10, Starting at 10 hours da morning in Brasilia time.

Source: Gizmodo