Slashdot Mirror
How Astronomers Will Take the "Image of the Century": a Black Hole
An anonymous reader writes with news that scientists may be close to getting the first image of a black hole. "Researchers studying the universe are ramping up to take the image of the century — the first ever image of a supermassive black hole. While the evidence for the existence of black holes is compelling, Scientists will continue to argue the contrary until physical, observational evidence is provided. Now, a dedicated team of astrophysicists armed with a global fleet of powerful telescopes is out to change that. If they succeed, they will snap the first ever picture of the monstrously massive black hole thought to live at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. This ambitious project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is incredibly tricky, but recent advances in their research are encouraging the team to push forward, now. The reason EHT needs to be so complex is because black holes, by nature, do not emit light and are, therefore, invisible. In fact, black holes survive by gobbling up light and any other matter — nearby dust, gas, and stars — that fall into their powerful clutches. The EHT team is going to zoom in on a miniscule spot on the sky toward the center of the Milky Way where they believe to be the event horizon of a supermassive black hole weighing in at 4 million times more massive than our sun. We can still see the material, however, right before it falls into eternal darkness. The EHT team is going to try and glimpse this ring of radiation that outlines the event horizon. Experts call this outline the "shadow" of a black hole, and it's this shadow that the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes."
We know quasars exist and involve radiation blasted out from the fucktons of matter pouring into early-universe supermassive blackholes.
What has yet to happen is someone has yet to image the black part of the black hole. The region that's quite literally so dark that light just falls into it. (depending on how thin the accretion disk is, it might not actually be black -- but it's going to be a hell of a lot less energetic than the regions near the disc/equator!). That's the image of the century: not the radiation blasted out from relativistic shockwaves of the unholy weirdness near a black hole, but the relative blackness of the event horizon itself against the backdrop of aforementioned unholy weirdness.
No quasars around here, the universe is over that by now. We have no tech with resolution sufficient to image a stellar mass black hole in my lifetime. But the big-ass one a mere 30000 light years away? Being so (relatively speaking) close makes up for all the gas and dust that's in the way. That one's observable. And yes, I've been wanting to see that image for about 30 years, and it can't come too soon.
They zoomed in even closer, and saw this: supermassive black hole.
It would be nice if science reported were color coded or something. Green for robust, independently verified and generally accepted stuff (general relativity, evolution, etc.), yellow for new stuff that's not yet independently verified but in line with well-tested models, and red for stuff that's exciting but very uncertain and/or likely to be wrong (faster-than-light neutrinos, string theory, dark matter annihilation observations in galaxies, etc). The sort of stuff you read about in the news is usually red or yellow, but is presented as if it were green. The article you quote falls squarely into the red category.