science

Black hole ANNOUNCEMENT: Event Horizon Telescope to reveal first ever picture on Wednesday


The groundbreaking achievement will be unveiled on Wednesday, April 10, during a series of simultaneous press conferences. For the first time ever, astronomers will show the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, a feat until recently thought impossible. Black holes are powerful wells of gravity where the pull is so strong even light is sucked in, making black holes seeming impossible to observe directly. But the Event Horizon Telescope, which is a series of observatories around the planet and not just one instrument, has scanned the regions of directly surrounding the black hole.

The results of these observations will be announced during six press events in the cities of Brussels in Belgium, Lyngby in Denmark, Santiago in Spain, Shanghai in China, Tokyo in Japan, Taipei in Taiwan and Washington DC in the US.

All of the conferences will kick off in tandem at 2pm BST here in the UK or 3pm CEST (1pm UTC).

Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency (ESA) told AFP: “More than 50 years ago, scientists saw that there was something very bright at the centre of our galaxy.

“It has a gravitational pull strong enough to make stars orbit around it very quickly – as fast as 20 years.”

READ MORE:

The black hole in the centre of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*.

According to US space agency , the black hole weighs in at four million times the mass of our Sun.

And the black hole is only located about 26,000 light-years away from Earth – a distance of 152,844,260,000,000,000 miles (245,978,990,000,000,000km).

Black holes cannot be directly observed from the Earth because the black hole’s gravity pulls in all approaching light.

READ MORE:

Astronomers have, however, been able to observe the effects a black hole has on the stars and cosmic gas clouds surrounding it.

NASA said: “Scientists can study stars to find out if they are flying around, or orbiting, a black hole.

“When a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made.

“This kind of light cannot be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and telescopes in space to see the high-energy light.”

READ MORE: 

The Event Horizon Telescope team came together in 2012 in a bid to chart the environment surrounding Sagittarius A*.

The team said such observations will help scientists better understand the gravitational effect near black holes and what happens to light when it is sucked in.

The ETH explained: “This capability would open a new window on the study of general relativity in the strong field regime, accretion and outflow processes at the edge of a black hole, the existence of event horizons, and fundamental black hole physics.”

The event horizon is a point of no return within a black hole, where the effects of gravity are simply too strong to escape.

When an object approaches the event horizon time appears to come to standstill when competed to distant observers.





READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.