Close-Up Images Of A Black Hole Can Be Released Next Week

A press conference will be held next week for announcing the results from the Event Horizon Telescope. This is a telescope network that is on the lookout for extremely large black holes in the galaxy center.

We still aren't in the know of what the outcome will be, but it will likely give us a completely different view of our universe.

Sagittarius A is considered to be a black hole

Priyamvada Natarajan, a professor of physics and astronomy from Yale University, said the event horizon of black holes indicates the limits of human understanding. The Event Horizon Telescope will be an effective tool to help humans expand their knowledge. Scientists are very much looking forward to the results of this telescope.

The black hole is thought to be created by super-dense remnants of collapsed stars and has such tremendous gravitational force that light can't escape. As we have seen in the previous images, black holes are completely black and invisible, scientists believe that radio waves emitted from gases and dust swirling around them. It can be seen by strong enough telescopes.

That's what the Event Horizon Telescope is aiming at. It works based on VLBI principles, short for very long baseline interferences. All telescope from all over the world, from the South Pole to Chile to the United States are combined and form the Event Horizon Telescope to simultaneously observe an object from outer space. That data is collected at one place and decoded to generate images that have a much higher resolution than those obtained by a single telescope. It can be said that it has turned the whole Earth into a large telescope observing the black hole. The center of the galaxy is 25,000 light-years away from us, equivalent to the size of the orbit of Mercury around the Sun. This telescope will help us to better visualize the center of the galaxy.

Up to now, the telescope has focused on observing Sagittarius A, which looks similar to a large black hole with 4 million times as much radio wave as the Sun. In addition, we also use this telescope to track another super-massive black hole that is 7 billion times more massive than the Sun. It also creates a stream of high-energy matter.

The National Science Foundation will host a press conference this week in Washington DC, simultaneously with those in Santiago, Taipei, Tokyo, and Shanghai to announce the results from the Event Horizon Telescope. Although we do not know what the result will be, if it is what the scientists hope it will probably become an extremely important picture in the history of space researches. The shadows that black holes create will be explored and studied further.

Avery Broderick, associate professor at the University of Waterloo said that simulating a black hole is similar to the result obtained from Event Horizon Telescope.

Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said if we could see the shadow, it would be a wonderful thing. Grant, also a member of the EHT upgrade committee, emphasized that although they don’t know how it works, if it has a shadow as we think, it proves their studies are in the right direction.

It brings excitement to all scientists because it can prove their assumptions are right at some points. But if it's not like what they expected, it still brings a lot of interesting things. Because no matter what the scientists are ready for the upcoming questions, new research and ideas will be opened when they witness the results of EHT.

We do not expect too much on this result, but organizing an international press conference shows that scientists really have something worth looking forward to and paying attention to. The press conference will start at 9 am EDT on April 10.