![]() ![]() ![]() Watching the black hole with the EHT is a bit like listening to a song that is played on a piano that has a lot of broken keys. The tone that is heard is related to the projected distance between the telescopes, as seen from the direction of the black hole the farther apart the telescopes, the higher the pitch of the note. Each pair of telescopes produces a measurement that corresponds to the tone of a just a single note. To give you an idea of how this works, you can think about the measurements we make from telescopes in the EHT as a bit like notes in a song. Since there is a lot of missing data, you may ask how making a picture is even possible. The imaging algorithms we develop fill in the gaps of data we are missing in order to reconstruct a picture of the black hole. However, since we are only collecting light at a few telescope locations, we are still missing some information about the black hole’s image. The light we collect gives us some indication of the structure of the black hole. Once the EHT has measured data from the black hole, we still need to make a picture from it - a process referred to as imaging. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collects light from the black hole using a small number of telescopes distributed around the Earth. The research is described in a study published in Nature Astronomy on Monday (July 19).įollow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.How do we make a picture from the sparse data collected by the EHT? The ultimate goal is to obtain images of the central black hole itself rather than its immediate surroundings - equivalent for what the team did for the black hole at the center of M87. ![]() In the future, the researchers plan to use space-based telescopes to image the environment surrounding the black hole at the center of Centaurus A at even shorter wavelengths and with even higher resolution, according to the statement. "The brightness contrast between the center and the edge could potentially provide us with new insights about the plasma physics both within and around jets, making Centaurus A an exciting target for next-generation black hole simulations." "Theoretically, jets can collide with galactic gas and heat up the edge, but the details of such a process so close to the black hole are a complete mystery," Koushik Chatterjee, a study co-author and researcher at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian said in the statement. The new images also reveal that the areas of the jet farther from the center are brighter than the parts closer to the black hole, a so-far unexplained phenomenon that has been observed previously. Scientists are still unraveling what powers the creation of the mysterious black hole jets, the sprays of material that somehow manage to escape the powerful pull of the black holes and instead of being trapped inside of their blackness end up traveling millions of light-years across distances greater than the size of the galaxies in which they originated. The partnership creates incredibly powerful observations because the resolution of a radio image is limited by the size of the telescope that receives the signal. The observations were made possible by the EHT collaboration, which brings together 8 radio observatories all around the globe that work together as one Earth-size telescope. The new images come from measurements obtained during the 2017 imaging campaign, which produced the first ever images of a black hole, the one at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy. (Submillimetre) NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (Image credit: ESO/WFI (Optical) MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. The Centaurus A galaxy with the powerful jets emerging from the supermassive black hole at its center. ![]()
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