During a 10-day period that began on April 5, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) or a network of eight radiofrequency observatories around the world, were pointed toward the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A (Sgr A), that hides in the Milky Way’s centre.
There were no major problems during the 10-day observation period, Newsweek has reported. The mass of data collected is being sent to two supercomputers in the US and Germany, and scientists expect to find out if they have the very first picture of a black hole in early 2018.
The project was to gather enough data to piece together the first snapshot a black hole’s event horizon. The telescopes collected radio waves emitting from Sgr A, as well as the neighbouring galaxy Messier 87, a huge elliptical galaxy 53mn light years away, to stitch them together into visual images. The EHT’s resolution is said to be about as good as being able to count the stitches on a baseball from about 13,000km away.
The hope is that the EHT should be able to provide a clear image showing the ring surrounding a black hole and its shadow. It is estimated that around one petabyte of data has been collected. To put that into perspective, a petabyte of MP3 songs would play continuously for more than 2,000 years without repeating. Scientists are collecting and distributing the data between two research institutes at MIT Haystack and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
The data, recorded on hard disks, will be plugged into two supercomputers to remove any time delays caused by the different global positioning of each telescope. Most of the data will be returned in the coming weeks, but what has been collected at the South Pole telescope will be unavailable for another six months as planes cannot land there because of winter. Scientists will have to wait until January next year for the complete dataset, only after which the imaging part can start in the real sense.
Black holes are considered as laboratories for extreme physics. Not even light can escape gravitational forces. An event horizon is the point of no return — it will drag in anything passing it. At the centre of a black hole is a one dimensional point that is unimaginably small, but contains a huge mass. At the singularity, spacetime curves infinitely and the laws of physics cease to exist.
From the initial image returned, scientists should be able to test relativity. In the longer term, astrophysicists will be able to start studying exactly how material is sucked into a black hole and how it gets launched out into a jet. With data from this project, humanity should be able to understand things about black holes that were never understood before.