Posts tagged black hole

International effort begins to photograph a black hole.

A picture of a black hole has never been achieved, due to the obvious problem that light is unable to escape from its grip, so it can not be photographed. Now an international team is planning to get an image of material as it enters the black hole that is thought to be at the center of our Milky Way.

“As dust and gas swirls around the black hole before it is drawn inside, a kind of cosmic traffic jam ensues,” Doeleman explained. “Swirling around the black hole like water circling the drain in a bathtub, the matter compresses and the resulting friction turns it into plasma heated to a billion degrees or more, causing it to ‘glow’ – and radiate energy that we can detect here on Earth.”

Another problem for the team will be to find a telescope big enough to get the image which is 26,000 light years away. That problem will be solved by connecting telescopes from across the planet, and combining the data. “To see something that small and that far away, you need a very big telescope, and the biggest telescope you can make on Earth is to turn the whole planet into a telescope”, says one researcher.

The effort will use up to 50 radio telescopes, including ones across Europe, the Americas, and even the South Pole and one atop a 15,000 peak in Mexico.

Largest water reservoir discovered in black hole.

The reservoir holds as much as 140 trillion oceans, or more than 4,000 times more than exists in the entire Milky Way. It exists as vapour spread across hundreds of light years.

While water has been found across much of the universe previously, this is interesting because of the fact this reservoir is 12 billion light years away, meaning that this water existed when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.