A Shot in the Dark: the First Image of a Black Hole

A Shot in the Dark: The First etry (VLBI) (visit EHT’s home page for more information[14]). VLBI create a collection of radio Image of a Black Hole wave detections that when pieced together created Written by Priscilla Dohrwardt a ”symphony” of noise (i.e radio waves). The black hole in question is only a mere 55 As Johnny Cash once said, ”I fell into a burning million light years from earth in the Messier 87 ring of fire” and on April 10th, so did the world. galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole, weighing The first ever black hole image graces us with a in at 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. To put black interior surrounded by what is referred to as that in perspective, the center of the black hole a ring of fire. is about the size of the Milky Way Galaxy. Not only are we all astonished by this mammoth, but even Professor Heino Falcke, the man behind the project, said, ”It is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Uni- verse” [15]. The team who captured the iconic black hole image happened to be in a collaborative project between NASA, MIT and various other partnered The first image of a black hole, located in countries within the National Science Foundation. the Messier 87 galaxy was captured by the They used 8 different radio telescopes around the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. Credits: world to collect an array of information. This NASA, Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et combination of telescopes created a ”super” tele- al.[12] scope that was named, the Event Horizon Tele- A black hole is an extremely dense astronom- scope (EHT). NASA’s astrophysics division direc- ical object. A black hole is comprised of three tor, Paul Hertz said, ’Years ago, we thought we major parts: an accretion disk (a disk surround- would have to build a very large space telescope ing the hole in which stellar materials have yet to image a black hole. By getting radio telescopes to be consumed), the event horizon (the marked around the world to work in concert like one in- border from which not even light can escape) and strument, the EHT team achieved this, decades the hole. Now I know what you’re thinking. If ahead of time”[15]. This creation not only pro- light can’t escape, then how did they capture the duced something that ”broke the internet”, but it image? The astronomers behind the project used will also continue to contribute to history. radio waves instead of visible light waves. Both While the group created this super telescope, waves can be detected by the stellar materials in Katie Bouman, a PhD student at Harvard led the the accretion disk, which is what is shown in the group that created the algorithm that pieced to- image. The disk creates heat as it spirals around gether the vast amount of information to create the black hole which can then be measured in many that glorious picture. CHIRP, the complex algo- different wavelengths.[13] rithm named by Bouman, took roughly four mil- The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) used lion billion bytes (four petabytes) and a year to a method called very long baseline interferom- complete [16]. Without this algorithm, the project 9 wouldn’t have been successful. Not only has this project been a major success, but it has a special place in Professor Heino Fal- cke’s heart. He proposed this project to the Euro- pean Research Council and began researching the topic for many years. In an interview with BBC, Falcke said, ”It’s a dream come true. You’ve been thinking about this for 20 years and now you fi- nally see it and it looks like in your dreams” [15]. But Falcke isn’t stopping there. He plans on con- tinuing and involving more sources to attempt to capture the black hole within our galaxy. Although this will be much more difficult, the team is up for the challenge. While one can’t really say what the future holds, with great minds like the ones involved in this project, maybe the world will be graced with another grand achievement within the next 20 years. 10.

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