10 deep lessons from our 1st image of a black hole's event horizon:
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first successful image of a black hole's event horizon. The black hole in question comes from the galaxy Messier 87: the largest and most massive galaxy within our local supercluster of galaxies. The event horizon's angular diameter was measured to be 42 micro-arc-seconds, implying that it would take 23 quadrillion black holes of equivalent size to fill the entire sky.
A large slew of stars have been detected near the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's core, while M87 offers the prospect of observing absorption features from nearby stars. That enables you to infer a mass for the central black hole, gravitationally. You can also make measurements of the gas orbiting a black hole. Gas measurements are systematically lower, while gravitational measurements are higher.
There's no one simple feature we can look at to tease out this nature. Rather, we have to construct dazzling models of the black hole itself and the matter outside of it, and then evolve them to see what occurs. When you look at the various signals that could emerge, you gain the ability to constrain what's possibly consistent with your results. The black hole must be rotating, and the rotational axis points away from Earth at about 17 degrees.
This artist’s impression depicts the paths of photons in the vicinity of a black hole. The gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon is the cause of the shadow captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. The photons that aren't captured create a characteristic sphere, and that helps us confirm General Relativity's validity in this newly-tested regime.5.
. With a reconstructed mass of 6.5 billion solar masses, it takes roughly a day for light to travel across the black hole's event horizon. This roughly sets the timescale over which we expect to see features change and fluctuate in the radiation observed by the Event Horizon Telescope. Rather than 6.5 billion solar masses, Sagittarius A*'s mass is only 4 million solar masses: 0.06% as great. That means, instead of varying on a timescale of about a day, we're looking at variability on the timescale of about a minute. Its features will evolve quickly, and when a flare occurs, it should be able to reveal what the nature of those flares are.
We know that the matter outside the event horizon, since it's based on moving charged particles , will generate its own magnetic field. Models indicate that the field lines can either remain in the accretion flows, or pass through the event horizon, resulting in the black hole anchoring them. There is a connection between these magnetic fields, black hole accretion and growth, and the jets that they emit.
The difficulty in making this measurement, today, is that you need a reference point to calibrate your position relative to the black hole's location. The technique to measure this would involve looking at your calibrator, then your source, then your calibrator, then your source, etc. This requires looking away and then back at your target very quickly.
But we could increase the power of the Event Horizon Telescope beyond the size of Earth by launching telescopes into orbit. In theory, this is already technologically feasible. In fact, theis doing it now! An array of spacecraft with radio telescopes in orbit around Earth would enable far superior resolution to what we have today. If we increased our baseline by a factor of 10 or 100, our resolution would increase by the same amount.
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