SCIENTISTS are expected to tomorrow unveil the first photograph of a black hole, a breakthrough in astrophysics providing insight into celestial monsters with gravitational fields so intense no matter or light can escape.
The US National Science Foundation has scheduled a news conference in Washington to announce a “groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project”, an international partnership formed in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.
Simultaneous news conferences are scheduled in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo. A black hole’s event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust, and all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including light – gets sucked in irretrievably.
While scientists involved in the research declined to disclose the findings before the formal announcement, they are clear about their goals.
“It’s a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of more than 200 people internationally,” said astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, the director of the EHT at the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian.
The research will put to the test a scientific pillar – physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, a project scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope.
That theory, put forward in 1915, was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.
The researchers targeted two supermassive black holes. Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are extraordinarily dense entities formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation, and perhaps merging with other black holes.
The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light – radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon – around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole.
This is known as the black hole’s shadow, or silhouette. Einstein’s theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole. “The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein’s theory,” Psaltis said.
“If we find it to be different to what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, ‘Clearly, something is not exactly right’.