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.
Testing these six lenses — the largest of which is 1.1 meters in diameter — will continue for about six weeks at the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona. It’s part of an effort to get DESI up and running sometime this year.
When complete, DESI will measure the light of tens of millions of galaxies reaching back 12 billion light years. That will enable scientists to 3D map the universe like never before and to measure its expansion. Ultimately, scientists are looking for insight into dark energy, which makes up an estimated 68 percent of the universe and is said to be the force behind its accelerating expansion. Scientists on the research team say they’re just as excited to find what they’re looking for — a better understanding of dark energy — as they are to discover what other mysteries DESI might reveal.
Today our middle-aged Universe looks eerily smooth. Too smooth, in fact.
While a rapid growth spurt in space-time would explain what we see, science needs more than nice ideas. It needs evidence that whittles away contending arguments. We might finally know where to look for some.
A team of physicists from the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Harvard University went back to the drawing board on the early Universe’s evolution to give us a way to help those inflation models stand out from the crowd.
They’ve captured our imaginations for decades, but we’ve never actually photographed a black hole before – until now.
Next Wednesday, at several press briefings around the world, scientists will apparently unveil humanity’s first-ever photo of a black hole, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Specifically, the photo will be of “Sagittarius A,” the supermassive black hole that’s at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
But aren’t black holes, well, black, and thus invisible, so none of our telescopes can “see” them? Yes – therefore the image we’re likely to see will be of the “event horizon,” the edge of the black hole where light can’t escape.
The European Southern Observatory has just revealed there will be a huge announcement next week. Yes, we know how that sounds — but as far as we can tell, it appears the world is about to finally see the first ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon.
Of course, we won’t know for sure until the press event itself, which we will cover live on our site. But here’s a massive clue: according to the advance statement, the researchers will be discussing the “first result from the Event Horizon Telescope.”
For years, the Event Horizon Telescope has been staring into the heart of the Milky Way, trying to obtain a photo of the location of Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.
The international team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is gearing up for a huge announcement next week — and according to ScienceAlert’s analysis, it’s likely to be the first-ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon.
If that prediction is correct, the April 10 event will be a monumental moment for science — providing a glimpse of one of the most epic objects in the known universe.
The hunt for gravitational waves is back on. After a series of upgrades, the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) will resume its search for ripples in space and time on Monday, April 1.
LIGO is famous for making the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for which the observatory’s founders were awarded the Nobel Prize. The observatory was able to detect gravity waves generated by two colliding black holes which were located 1.3 billion light-years away from Earth, and since then has observed nine more black hole mergers and one collision of two neutron stars.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused by massive bodies which bend it like a bowling ball placed on a rubber sheet. They were predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity in 1916, but it took nearly a century for physicists to observe them because the effects are so small. Since these waves have been detected, they can be used to investigate cosmic objects as an alternative to light-based telescopes.
Physicists have measured the sound of ‘nothingness’ at room temperature — an important step in our future ability to listen in to the Universe.
You can think of it a little like this — we’ve now been able to measure the way some of the ubiquitous ‘background noise’ of space interacts with our equipment, which will hopefully help us tune it out going forward.
After all, the entire Universe is crackling with the static of quantum physics, and in order to be able to pick up the faint echoes of distant astronomical giants — such as the gravitational waves rippling off a black hole merger, for example — we need to be able to tune out the quantum static.
