Astronomers are capturing video of a black hole for the first time

Contrary to science fiction, black holes are not portals to other dimensions or cosmic vacuum cleaners that swallow everything around them.

Astronomer Sarah Markoff explains, “The media always portrays black holes as pits of despair, and everything falls into them, but they’re a lot more fun than that.” quirks and quarks host boB. McDonald.

Markoff is part of a global team working to capture the first video of a black hole, a scientific leap that could reveal how these mysterious cosmic objects behave.

“There are a lot of questions about black holes that we would like to answer,” he said.

In 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole – a supermassive at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, about 50 million light-years away from Earth – using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio telescopes that operate as a single virtual instrument, connecting facilities from Antarctica to Spain and Chile.

Markoff, the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, says the EHT is now being used to track the supermassive black hole in motion in M87 – an advance that could reveal details that still images cannot. There are now a total of 12 telescopes, but only eleven will participate, because the South Pole telescopes cannot see M87.

This time, images will be taken more frequently – every three to four days from March to April – allowing astronomers to bring the black hole’s motion to life.

The black hole in M87 is a prime candidate to watch, as it evolves very slowly compared to the others, ranging from several days to a week.YS Vincent Fish, Operational Data Manager for EHT.

That slow motion allows astronomers to combine the entire night’s data into one image — snapshots that can be stitched together over time to create what Fish calls a “time-lapse movie” of the black hole in motion.

choosing what to film

Black holes themselves change very little on human time scales, but the hot gas swirling around them does. That material forms a turbulent disk that is constantly changing and churning, says Markoff, who is also a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam.

For the black hole in M87, those changes appear in just a few days to a week. Capturing only a single snapshot each year, as researchers have done previously, means missing much of its dynamic behavior.

While there is another suitable candidate for observation – Sagittarius A* – it may be too restless to film, according to Fish, who is also a research scientist at the MIT Haystack Observatory.

Located at the center of our home galaxy, Sagittarius A* changes so rapidly that observations taken just an hour apart can show completely different objects, making detailed study difficult, he says.

extreme physics test

According to Markoff, it will take a long time to process the many “petabytes of data” recorded at each telescope before getting to the point of analyzing them to produce the images needed for the video.

But once it’s ready, the video could help answer some of the biggest questions about how black holes work, she says.

The matter swirling around the black hole rotates at close to the speed of light, she says, reaching conditions far beyond anything scientists can create in laboratories on Earth. Because of this, astronomers have developed competing theories about what happens in these extreme environments.

Researchers hope the new observations will help resolve some of those debates, she says: Which direction is the black hole rotating? How does it eat the surrounding matter? Why does some material fall inward and grow into the black hole, while other material explodes outward in a “big firehose-like” jet of plasma?

Others may release winds of material, Markoff says, and some – like Sagittarius A* – remain largely inactive, leading scientists to suspect that black holes may cycle through active and quiescent phases over time.

Understanding these processes matters, she says, because the effects of black holes extend far beyond their immediate surroundings.

For example, she says, M87’s jets blast through the galaxy and inject enormous amounts of energy into the surrounding gas. This process – known as galactic “feedback” – can heat the gas and prevent it from cooling enough to form new stars.

Thus, black holes can occur Control the evolution of your host galaxiesSometimes the star is growing, extinguishing or even ceasing to form.

“When we think about living in this time and place in the universe, we ask ourselves, ‘How did we get here?’ Why does the universe look the way it does?” Markoff said.

“We know that black holes played a big role.”