Black holes are fascinating although they have never been photographed. Now scientists are readying to photograph the mega black hole lying at the middle of Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, for the first time.
They have already set up the multiple radio receivers as a network of the planet-wide virtual telescope chain including the South Pole, Americas, and Europe.
Powerful Black Hole Sagittarius A*
Sagittarius A*, located at a distance of 26,000 light-years from Earth, lies at the heart of the Milky Way and wields powerful influence over the orbits of other stars.
The light emitted by the black hole comes from the dust particles and gas that attain high acceleration before they are torn up and eaten up.
In terms of mass, the black hole Sagittarius A* is 4 million times that of the Sun with its gravity-wielding edge that traps stars and is spread over an expanse of more than 12 million miles in terms of diameter.
The telescope network for the imaging, called as Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, will be activated between April 5 and 14.
"There's great excitement," said project leader Sheperd Doeleman from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"We've been fashioning our virtual telescope for almost two decades now, and in April we're going to make the observations that we think have the first real chance of bringing a black hole's event horizon into focus," Doeleman said.
Procedure Of Imaging
When the 12 widely spaced radio facilities start focusing on the black hole, they will be using very long baseline array interferometry, or VLBI, technique. The Sagittarius A* will appear like a tiny dot in the sky, and the radio antennas will work simultaneously and jointly as a telescopic aperture and take up the desired resolution to comprehend the black hole.
VLBI involves a bunch of receivers focusing on radio waves emitted by an object in space, all at one time. The virtual telescope will trail the radio waves with a wavelength of 1.3 mm (230 GHz) to peer through the clouds of gas and dust for imaging the black hole.
When all the antennae turn to a single spot, the resolution maintained will be 50 micro arc seconds, which can even view a grapefruit on the Moon's surface.
The Event Horizon Telescope will scale up to the desired resolution to photograph the black hole directly after observing its environment.
There is both anxiety and excitement over the possible outcome of the project. If it turns successful in taking the image of the dark spot, researchers predict the black hole will look like a dark blob surrounded by a bright cluster of light.
Black Hole Helping Star Formation
Meanwhile, scientists discovered a black hole abetting star formation by recycling hot gas into cold fuel. This was noticed at the Phoenix cluster, a behemoth of 1,000 galaxies lying at 5.7 billion light-years from Earth.
According to scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, extremely hot 10-million-degree gas has been blazing out from the black hole along with trains of bubbles onto the plasma around. They said these jets might be helping star birth by removing cold gas to make the core fuel for making stars.
It is also possible that the hot jets and bubbles coming from the Phoenix cluster may be raining back on the galaxy to aid more starbursts.
"We have thought the role of black hole jets and bubbles was to regulate star formation and to keep cooling from happening," said Michael McDonald, an assistant professor at MIT.
