Photo of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy taken by the EHT telescope. (EHT)
SPACE — In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) managed to reveal the first sighting photo of a black hole. The image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy is a breakthrough.
In 2022, EHT made another breakthrough by revealing a photo of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Now, astronomers have a new purpose with the instrument. Scientists want to uncover photons orbiting black holes.
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Black holes are mysterious. Black holes can devour everything around them. It is known that photos of black holes can be obtained from light bent by the black hole’s gravity.
The light, called photons, is very close to the black hole. Scientists believe that photons can actually orbit black holes.
The closer the photon is to the black hole, the more frequently the photon orbits the supermassive black hole. The more orbits the photons make, the sharper this photon ring becomes. That’s what astronomers want to reveal next.
The scientist took a theoretical approach to extract the photon ring signal from the current EHT data. Observations made in recent years will further refine this measurement. But to really see the photon ring, the telescope has to be made much sharper.
EHT
The EHT is eight radio telescopes scattered around the world from Europe to America to Antarctica to create telescopes the size of Earth.
A neat trick in radio astronomy allows scientists to increase image resolution by having two telescopes look at the same object at the same time.
Now, scientists are making a $300 million Event Horizon Explorer (EHE) proposal. This is a spacecraft project that could make telescopes bigger and allow researchers to investigate photon rings.
“What we are trying to do now is launch a space mission that will increase the sharpness of EHT images by a factor of 10,” said mission co-promoter Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA). /8/2023).
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2023-08-10 03:56:00
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