Further studies of the supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy confirm that it continues to act as predicted by the theory of relativity.
Hello darkness, our old friend, we have come to see you again.
At the center of Messier 87, a giant galaxy 55 million light years from Earth, there is a darkness more than 38 billion kilometers wide and as massive as 6.5 billion suns,
a hatch
to infinity called a black hole. .
In 2017, a group of astronomers were operating the
Event Horizon Telescope
, a globe-spanning array of antennas, when they produced an image of the black hole in Messier 87, or M87, the first of any black hole.
This artist's concept shows a galaxy with a bright quasar, a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that has millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at its center.
NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)/ Reuters
The image revealed a ring of hot gas, slightly tilted, rotating around a dark vacuum like water running in circles around a drain, just as Albert Einstein
's theory of general relativity
had predicted in 1915.
When the image was revealed 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, even in a better way.
In 2018, a year after capturing the first image, astronomers looked again into the darkness of M87 with a slightly expanded grid that provided
greater resolution
.
The result, published last week in the journal
Astronomy and Astrophysics
, shows the same irregular ring and central hole in even more substantial detail, suggesting that astronomers had done things right the first time.
“The first image of a black hole looked so much like the mathematical predictions that it almost seemed like a fluke,” Dominic Chang, a doctoral candidate in physics at Harvard who works on the Event Horizon team, said in a press release. issued by the Harvard & Smithsonian Astrophysics Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the project is based.
“Having the opportunity to do new tests using new data, with a new telescope, and see the same structure, is a
crucial confirmation
of our most significant conclusions,” he said.
There was a change in the ring around the M87 black hole.
Its brightest knot had moved about
30 degrees
counterclockwise around the ring from where it had been a year earlier.
Astronomers said they had predicted the hot spot would move.
"Although general relativity says that the size of the ring should remain fairly fixed, emission from the turbulent and disordered accretion disk around the black hole will cause the brightest part of the ring to wobble around a common center," said Britt Jeter, postdoctoral researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, in the press release.
“The amount of wobble we see over time is something we can use to test our theories about
the magnetic field and plasma environment
around the black hole.”
Sheperd Doeleman, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and founding director of the Event Horizon Collaboration, added in an email:
“In other words, the M87 supermassive black hole is behaving just as we thought it would.”
For Einstein, black holes were one of many problematic predictions that arose from general relativity, which attributed what we call gravity to warps in the geometry of space-time.
One was that the universe was expanding.
Another was that if too much matter or energy was concentrated within a certain radius—now called the event horizon—it would collapse forever into a hole in space-time from which not even light could escape.
Extravagance
Einstein agreed with the mathematics, but thought nature would find a way not to shape such extravagance.
But now scientists know that the universe is
full of black holes
;
Experiments like the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO,
have heard them crash into each other,
and the Event Horizon Telescope has brought them into palpable reality.
Many black holes are dead stars that collapsed when they ran out of thermonuclear fuel, but a giant black hole millions or billions of times as massive as an ordinary star appears to lie at the center of most galaxies.
Astronomers still don't know how they came to exist.
Thanks to a quirk of nature, two of these supermassive black holes—in M87 and at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy—are large enough in the sky to be imaged and studied by the Event Horizon Telescope.
An image of our own black hole, called Sgr A*, which is located 27,000 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, made its debut in 2022.
We can expect more from these portraits of destiny.
Doeleman and his team plan to continue adding them to their network and eventually create
a movie of black holes
.
Die of envy, Netflix!
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