Categories: Technology

New images of black holes confirm Einstein’s theory

Two new images of the supermassive black hole M87*, created from observations collected in April 2017 and April 2018. (Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/The New York Times)

Further study of the supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy confirms that it continues to function as predicted by the theory of relativity.

Hello darkness, our old friend, we have come to meet you again.

At the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth, more than 38 billion kilometers wide and as massive as 6.5 billion suns lies a dark, stretching to infinity called a black hole.

in 2017A group of astronomers were operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of antennas spanning the globe, when An image of a black hole was captured in Messier 87, or M87, the first image of any black hole, The image shows a ring of hot gas, slightly tilted, moving around a dark void like water flowing in circles around a drain, as in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Had predicted in 1915. When the image surfaced in 2019, it made the front page of media outlets around the world. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Now the same team of scientists has done it again in an even better way. In 2018, a year after the first image was captured, astronomers looked again into the darkness of M87 with a slightly expanded grid that provided greater resolution. The results, published last week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, show the same irregular ring and central hole in even greater detail, showing that astronomers got it right the first time.

“The first image of a black hole was so similar to mathematical predictions that it almost seemed like a coincidence,” Dominic Chang, a doctoral candidate in physics at Harvard who works on the Event Horizon team, said in a press release. The Harvard and Smithsonian Astrophysics Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the project is based.

“Having the opportunity to conduct new tests using new data with a new telescope and see the same structure is an important confirmation of our most important findings,” he said.

Changes occurred in the ring around the M87 black hole. Its brightest node had moved around the ring about 30 degrees counterclockwise from where it had been a year earlier. Astronomers said they had predicted that the hot spot would move.

Postdoctoral researcher Britt Jeter said, “Although general relativity says the ring’s shape should remain largely constant, the brightest part of the ring rotates around a common center due to emission from the turbulent and chaotic accretion disk around the black hole. Will waver.” at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, in press release. ,We can use the fluctuations we see over time to test our theories about the magnetic field and plasma environment around black holes.,

Shepard Doleman, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and founding director of the Event Horizon Collaboration, said in an email: “In other words, M87’s supermassive black hole is behaving exactly as we thought.,

For Einstein, black holes were one of many problematic predictions. It arose from general relativity, which attributed what we call gravity to the distortion in the geometry of space-time. One was that the universe was expanding. The second was that if too much matter or energy was concentrated into a certain radius – now called the event horizon – it would collapse forever into a hole in space-time from which even light would not be able to escape.

Einstein agreed with mathematics, But he thought that nature would find a way to prevent such extravagance from shaping, But now Scientists know the universe is full of black holes, Experiments like the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, have heard them colliding with each other, and the Event Horizon Telescope has brought them into apparent reality. Many black holes are dead stars that collapse when they run out of thermonuclear fuel, but supermassive black holes millions or billions of times larger than an ordinary star appear to lie at the center of most galaxies. Astronomers still don’t know how they came into existence.

Thanks to a quirk of nature, two of these supermassive black holes – the one in M87 and the one at the center of our own galaxy – are so large in the sky that they can be imaged and studied by the Event Horizon Telescope. An image of our own black hole, called Sgr A*, located 27,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, appeared for the first time in 2022.

We can expect more from these pictures of destiny. Doleman and his team plan to continue adding them to their network and eventually make a film of the black hole. Die of jealousy, Netflix!

dennis overby He is the outer space correspondent for The Times and also covers physics and astronomy.

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