Paris (AFP) - The world, it seems, is soon to see the first picture of a black hole.
On
Wednesday, astronomers across the globe will hold "six major press
conferences" simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event
Horizon Telescope (EHT), which was designed precisely for that purpose.
It has been
a long wait.
Of all the
forces or objects in the Universe that we cannot see -- including dark energy
and dark matter -- none has frustrated human curiosity so much as the invisible
maws that shred and swallow stars like so many specks of dust.
Astronomers
began speculating about these omnivorous "dark stars" in the 1700s,
and since then indirect evidence has slowly accumulated.
"More
than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the
centre of our galaxy," Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European
Space Agency and an expert on black holes, told AFP.
"It
has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very
quickly -- as fast as 20 years."
To put that
in perspective, our Solar System takes about 230 million years to circle the
centre of the Milky Way.
Eventually,
astronomers speculated that these bright spots were in fact "black
holes" -- a term coined by American physicist John Archibald Wheeler in
the mid-1960s -- surrounded by a swirling band of white-hot gas and plasma.
At the
inner edge of these luminous accretion disks, things abruptly go dark.
"The
event horizon" -- a.k.a. the point-of-no-return -- "is not a physical
barrier, you couldn't stand on it," McNamara explained.
"If
you're on the inside of it, you can't escape because you would need infinite
energy. And if you are on the other side, you can -- in principle."
A golf
ball on the moon
At its
centre, the mass of a black hole is compressed into a single, zero-dimensional
point.
The
distance between this so-called "singularity" and the event horizon
is the radius, or half the width, of a black hole.
The EHT that collected the data for the first-ever image is unlike any ever devised.
The EHT that collected the data for the first-ever image is unlike any ever devised.
"Instead
of constructing a giant telescope -- which would collapse under its own weight
-- we combined several observatories as if they were fragments of a giant
mirror," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric
Radio Astronomy in Grenoble, told AFP.
In April
2017, eight such radio telescopes scattered across the globe -- in Hawaii,
Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole -- were trained on two black
holes in very different corners of the Universe to collect data.
Studies
that could be unveiled next week are likely to zoom in on one or the other.
Oddsmakers
favour Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own elliptical
galaxy that first caught the eye of astronomers.
Sag A* has
four million times the mass of our sun, which means that the black hole is
generates is about 44 million kilometres across.
That may
sound like a big target, but for the telescope array on Earth some 26,000
light-years (or 245 trillion kilometres) away, it's like trying to photograph a
golf ball on the Moon.
Testing
Einstein
The other
candidate is a monster black hole -- 1,500 times more massive even than Sag A*
-- in an elliptical galaxy known as M87.
It's also a
lot farther from Earth, but distance and size balance out, making it roughly as
easy (or difficult) to pinpoint.
One reason
this dark horse might be the one revealed next week is light smog within the
Milky Way.
"We
are sitting in the plain of our galaxy -- you have to look through all the
stars and dust to get to the centre," said McNamara.
The data
collected by the far-flung telescope array still had to be collected and
collated.
"The
imaging algorithms we developed fill the gaps of data we are missing in order
to reconstruct a picture of a black hole," the team said on their website.
Astrophysicists
not involved in the project, including McNamara, are eagerly -- perhaps
anxiously -- waiting to see if the findings challenge Einstein's theory of
general relativity, which has never been tested on this scale.
Breakthrough
observations in 2015 that earned the scientists involved a Nobel Prize used
gravitational wave detectors to track two black holes smashing together.
As they
merged, ripples in the curvatures of time-space creating a unique, and
detectable, signature.
"Einstein's
theory of general relativity says that this is exactly what should
happen," said McNamara.
But those
were tiny black holes -- only 60 times more massive than the Sun -- compared to
either of the ones under the gaze of the EHT.
"Maybe
the ones that are millions of times more massive are different -- we just don't
know yet."
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"Recalibration of the Universe"– Jan 25, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text Version)
"Recalibration of the Universe"– Jan 25, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text Version)
“… The entire galaxy revolves as one plate, in a very counter-intuitive way. The stars and the constellations do not orbit within the rules of Newtonian physics that you are used to seeing all around you in your own solar system. For the stars and clusters in your galaxy, distance from the center does not matter. All the stars rotate as one. This is because the galaxy is entangled with the middle of itself. In that state, there is no time or distance. The change of consciousness on this planet has changed the center of the galaxy. This is because what happens here, dear one, is "known" by the center.
It's interesting to us what your reaction to all this is scientifically. You saw that the "creative event" of your Universe is missing some energy in order for it to have formed as it did. In addition, the unusual way the galaxy rotates, as I just stated, was also noted. So you have calculated that for all this to be in place, there has to be missing 3D matter, and you have given it a name - dark matter. How funny! Did you ever think that there could be a multidimensional effect going on that you now can observe and calculate - that has immense power, but can't be seen? It's not "matter" at all and it's not 3D. It's quantum energy.
Let me tell you something about physics. Yet again, I'll make it simple. Everything your scientists have seen in physics happens in pairs. At the moment, there are four laws of physics in your three-dimensional paradigm. They represent two pairs of energy types. Eventually, there will be six. At the center of your galaxy is what you call a black hole, but it is not a single thing. It is a duality. There is no such thing as "singularity". You might say it's one energy with two parts - a weak and a strong quantum force. And the strangest thing is it knows who you are. It is the creator engine. It's different in other galaxies than this one. It's unique.
The very physics of your galaxy is postured by what you do here. The astronomers can look into the cosmos and they will discover different physics in different galaxies. Could it be that there's something going on in the other galaxies like this one? I'm not going to answer that. … “
The very physics of your galaxy is postured by what you do here. The astronomers can look into the cosmos and they will discover different physics in different galaxies. Could it be that there's something going on in the other galaxies like this one? I'm not going to answer that. … “
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