“But why do you want to take a picture of a black hole?”
The question should not be unexpected, but I will get it right. I have just told you, in my opinion, the fantastic news that the Event horizon telescope will soon hold a press conference again. Three years ago struck Event horizon telescope world with amazement with the first image ever of a black hole. And when they announce another press conference, the probability is very high that they have now also managed to depict the black hole Sagittarius A * in the middle of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
But why, my colleagues wonder. Why do you want to take a picture of Sagittarius A *?
My first spontaneous thought is to quote the British mountaineer George Mallory’s answer to the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest:
”Because it’s there” – because it’s there.
We know there is one super heavy black hole in the center of the galaxy. It is clear that we want to see what it looks like.
Our human curiosity and the desire to explore, investigate and understand knows no bounds. It is he who has taken us to where we are today. Although the obstacles and challenges have sometimes been as difficult to climb as Mount Everest.
And the challenges to take the image that Event horizon telescope presented on Thursday has really been huge. It took eight telescopes on four continents, more than 300 scientists from 80 institutions around the world, as well as engineers and technical staff, millions of gigabytes of data, several supercomputers and five years of calculations to produce it.
Therefore, the audience applauded at the press conference for a long time when we finally got to see the picture. I started crying myself. That they succeeded was so great, in every conceivable sense of the word. In addition, the image became a necessary reminder of what humanity can actually achieve when we work together across borders.
But is it really important to see the shadow of a black hole?
I asked the question to Robert Cumming, astronomer and communicator at Onsala Space Observatory and at Chalmers and to Jonas Enander, a physics teacher at the Royal Institute of Technology, who is writing a book about black holes and who was allowed to be in one of the telescopes when the data was collected in to Event horizon telescope.
Their answer was about how black holes are the most extreme places in the universe, the extreme limits of space and time, where everything is turned upside down and the laws of physics break down. It’s almost like a holy place, where we do not know how something works and are challenged to think about what we really know and what we just think we know. ”Like looking at the gate of hell: the end of space and time”, As Heino Falcke, one of those who already in 1999 figured out how to take the picturehas expressed it.
Robert Cummings also emphasized the rare ability of black holes to be simple and difficult at the same time. “Everyone from young children to Stephen Hawking gets an equal challenge from even thinking about them. No other natural phenomenon works so democratically. ”
But is a picture really needed?
“We do not have to create an image,” one of the researchers told Jonas Enander. “We can analyze data directly and draw conclusions from it. But it is clear that we want a picture. Why should we not want to see what happens at the border of a black hole? ”
A picture says more than a thousand words, it is said. And the image of Sagittarius A *, in the constellation Sagittarius and in the middle of the Milky Way, our home in the cosmos, at least tells me more than any other scientific analysis, study and result that can come out of the five million gigabytes of data that radio telescopes have collected in.
Read more:
The picture of the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way
Everything you want to know about black holes
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