New image of black hole reveals changes in its surroundings – 01/28/2024 – Sideral Messenger

The international consortium responsible for the first image of a black hole has just returned to work with a new observation, which reveals changes in the mysterious object’s surroundings – but all in accordance with what was expected from theoretical predictions.

April 10, 2019, made history when the EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) group presented the world with a view of the supermassive black hole that lives in the heart of the M87 galaxy – a giant that is 6.5 billion times as massive. from the Sun, located 55 million light years from Earth.

The EHT is actually a set of radio telescopes spread around the world that operate in synchrony to collect, together, observations that could only be obtained by a single antenna that was comparable in size to the Earth itself. Only with the extraordinary resolution obtained by the group is it possible to observe the shadow of the black hole, a region inside the event horizon, a point from which nothing can escape its gravity, not even light. Hence the darkness in the center of the image.

And it’s not all dark because the object is surrounded by matter that is about to be consumed by the black hole and, before falling into it, is accelerated to great speeds, emitting radiation that makes it observable. The distribution of this matter around the black hole varies over time, which can be observed by recording the object at different times.

The data that produced the first image of the center of M87 was collected on April 11, 2017 and has been scrutinized until now in scientific studies. But new observations were carried out on April 21, 2018, with the inclusion of another important telescope, in Greenland, and improvements in the data collection and processing system across the EHT, producing a new image.

The inner shadow is still there, basically the same size, as is the surrounding ring, providing confirmation for the original 2017 observation. What’s new is that the ring’s brightest point has rotated about 30 degrees from one year to the next. It is a variation that is within the theoretical predictions of the behavior of matter in the extreme environment that surrounds a supermassive black hole.

The new result, published this January in an article in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is just the beginning of a new battery of images and results that the EHT should produce, not only of M87’s central black hole, but also of its equivalent ( much more modest) existing in the heart of the Milky Way, an object known as Sagittarius-A* (said to be “Sagittarius-A-star”).

In addition to the data collected in 2018, the array of radio telescopes also carried out successful observation campaigns in 2021 and 2022. The data is in the process of being analyzed, and the next campaign to collect photos of black holes should come by the middle of this year. With this, in addition to confirming previous discoveries and improving the ability to produce these images, the researchers hope to advance the study of the magnetic field and plasma environment around supermassive black holes.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

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