The Latest News About Black Holes

Cristina Boros April 13, 2019 2 Comments

Do you still believe black holes are just rumors? Finally, we have proved and here is the latest news about black holes.

An international team formed by 48 astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University discovered 83 supermassive back holes closed to the edge of the Visible Universe. Those giants were formed when the entire Universe was just at the beginning of its life, actually just about 10 percent from what is it now. They are located about 13 billion light-years away from the Earth

The discovery was described in The Astrophysical Journal and in the Publications of the Astronomical Observatory Of Japan. Michael Strauss, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University who was involved in this research said ‘It’s remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang. Understanding how black holes can for, in the early Universe, and just how common they are, is a challenge for our cosmological models’

Few Things Explained

When a supermassive black hole shoots out a gas, matter, in powerful jets can finally be visible because this makes it looks bright. For this reason, those brightest objects in our Universe are called ‘Quasars’. So to make it more clear, as the matter swirls around a massive black hole such intense radiation generated by its friction makes those giants visible from a billion light-years away. So those 83 new black holes discovered are quasars. Without this radiation, black holes can’t be seen and many people, including scientists, didn’t believe they actually exist.

10 April 2019

Finally, an international team of scientists proved the existence of the black holes. This morning, on 10th April, was released the first photo of a massive black hole. The scientists used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry ( VLBI). They constructed a network of radio telescopes in different places in the world and they succeed to produce a series of images, collecting one million gigabytes of data. The young lady behind this amazing discovery is Katie Bouman an MIT Graduate, who created a new computer algorithm that spent about two years to gather data and stick them together creating a huge virtual radio telescope. This giant, wide as the earth allowed to obtain the resolution needed to capture this amazing photo.

This achievement, the first-ever photo of a black hole confirmed Einstein’s theory, a century ago. One thing I am personally very sorry, after all his research, dedicating all his life to science Stephen Hawkins was not here to see it.

More About Those Giant Black Holes

First of all, let’s see where are the black holes discovered. It is located in a very far away galaxy, Messier 87, at a distance of 5 billion kilometers from earth and its mass is 6.5 billion times than the mass of our sun. In its even horizon, the center of the black hole, nothing can escape, not even light.

To be able to capture an image in detail, scientists had to capture the radiation of this Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) from the Messier Galaxy at a wavelength of 1 mm. Just to make it more clear, the best telescopes can capture 1 cm wavelength. This is the reason why the achievement of The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is so incredible.

This team used three telescopes: The Subaru Telescope( Japan), The Gran Telescopio Canarias( Spain) and the Gemini South telescope (Chile)

A Little Bit Of Science

The back holes or better say the quasars in this research are at a distance of 13 billion light-years away from the earth as I said in the beginning.so, what we see now, is the light of what they were about 13 billion years ago, 800 million years after the Big bang, so when we had just a baby Universe.

In the Universe the Hydrogen was neutral in the beginnings but after it was split into protons and electrons and was reionized when the first generation of stars appeared, and black holes were born.

This huge achievement needed the hard work of 200 scientists. They needed supercomputers and a huge amount of terabytes of data which was delivered to them ion different places of the earth by plane.

Now maybe you ask your self what about our galaxy? Scientists, astronomers discovered a long time ago radio waves coming from the center of our galaxy, Milky Way. A physicist working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Karl G. Jansky, tried to investigate the source of those radio waves but he didn’t have the support of the laboratory or anybody else.

Two astronomers, Bruce Balick and Robert L. Brown discovered the black hole in the center of Milky way and named it Sagittarius A. they published an article in 1974 describing the black hole as a bright radio source in the center of our Galaxy.

Scientists think that most galaxies have a black hole in the center. In the 2000s astronomers observed the change in gravitation around Sagittarius A, and they calculated the mass in of this black hole to be 4 million times the mass of the sun.

What scientists said

Jesica Dempsey, when she says for the first time the image it reminds her of the movie Lord of the Rings, the Eye of Sauron. She is a researcher at the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii. ‘We’ve been hunting this for a long time. We’ve been getting closer and closer with better technology’ she said and finally, the did it.

Also, Dempsey explained ‘The team looked at two supermassive black holes, the M87 and the one at the center of the Milky Way. The one in our galaxy is closer but much smaller, so they both look the same size in the sky. But the more distant one was easier to take pictures because it rotates more slowly.’

Vishniac Ethan, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland said that the image was ‘ an amazing technical achievement’ and it also ‘gives us a glimpse of gravity in its most extreme manifestation.’

John Kormendy, an astronomer at the University of Texas said ‘ It’s just seriously cool. To see the stuff going down the tubes so to speak, to see it firsthand. The mystique of black holes in the community is very substantial. that mystique is going to be made more real.’

Loeb and Kormendy said that even if people believe that a black hole will rip your apart, some, like the one in the picture, is so big that easily someone could fall inside it and it is not necessary to be ripped apart. But as Loeb also said, once you cross a black hole, you can’t come back and you are not able to communicate. In 2017 The Event Horizon telescope included eight radio observatories but in the next year 2020 are expecting to be added another three observatories and scientists hope to capture images of more black holes with a much better resolution said Loeb.

There are a lot of things to say about these giants in our Universe but I don’ t want to make you tired so if you want to know more..just tell me.

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Cristina Boros

I have always been interested in time travel. From a very young age I was forever watching movies that would take me back in time.

I would love to hear from all of you who are also interested in this subject. Movies? Science? Book? Literature?

Whatever your interest is, I would love to meet you.