Participants of the Event Horizon Telescope project are preparing to receive the first "photographs" of a supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy using the largest ground-based radio telescope-interferometer, the area of a "virtual" dish which is larger than the Earth, according to the US National Science Foundation.
“This week opens a new era in astronomy. The EHT telescope will receive the first "photograph" of a supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy. The radio telescopes of the world, run by the ALMA observatory in Chile, will work together to test the fundamental laws of physics,”said the head of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Franz Cordova (France Cordova).
As scientists said, this week they begin observing the "event horizon" at a black hole in the center of our galaxy using the Event Horizons Telescope interferometer. The study combined the power of the world's most sensitive radio observatories in Spain, California, Arizona, the Hawaiian Islands and even at the earth's south pole.
The main goal of the project, as its name implies, is to "get close" to the event horizon of the black hole Sgr A *, located in the center of the Milky Way, and comprehensively study its properties. Combining the power of the telescopes makes it possible to achieve a resolution that exceeds the Hubble sensitivity by a factor of a thousand.
Scientists spoke of the first successes and observations back in April last year. According to them, EHT managed to get close to the event horizon of "our" black hole and achieve a record resolution, 10 times higher than the accuracy of previous observations. A little later, in December 2016, they measured the strength of magnetic fields in the vicinity of Sgr A *.
Observations of the Sgr A * event horizon were made possible by the addition of the world's largest millimeter radio telescope to the EHT project this week, the ALMA observatory on the Chahnantor high plateau in Chile, said MIT astronomer Geoff Crew.
This process, according to Crew, was not trivial, since ALMA itself is an interferometer combining 61 powers of a relatively small antenna. MIT programmers and astronomers had to create a special set of programs and connect high-precision atomic clocks to ALMA in order to make all antennas work synchronously with each other and with the telescopes participating in the project.
The efforts were justified - after connecting ALMA to the network, the sensitivity and resolution of the EHT increased by an order of magnitude, now astrophysicists can actually see the black hole event horizon. Two scientific groups will begin such observations in April, MIT explained.
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In addition to the Sgr A * event horizon, scientists will try to get images of the vicinity of the black hole in the core of the neighboring galaxy M87, which "looks" at us from a convenient angle for observing its central part.
Astronomers will not immediately learn about the results of the observations, since all the data recorded by the telescopes participating in the EHT will have to be “manually” sent to MIT for combining and analysis. Hard disks with recorded information, as the project participants explain, will be easier to bring to the United States on board an aircraft than to transmit this information through the global network, since the transfer of several petabytes of data via the Internet will take too long.
Astronomers hope that when the process is complete, the images and data obtained will be clear enough to test all the basic calculations of the theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of black holes, and, perhaps, understand why it does not agree with quantum physics.