The EHT could get yet another boost after that. Resolution can also be improved by observing targets in multiple electromagnetic frequencies, Doeleman and Johnson said.) (New dishes aren't the only way to boost the EHT, by the way. The goal is to get a final design in place within three or four years and have everything up and running before the end of the decade, Doeleman said.
National Science Foundation to get the ball rolling on the next-gen EHT. The collaboration has already secured funding from the U.S. For example, the upgraded partnership should allow the collaboration to gain a much better understanding of black hole jets, beams of particles that the behemoths blast out at nearly the speed of light. The next-gen EHT will provide other benefits as well, Doeleman and Johnson said. Related: Images: Black holes of the universe EHT observations already allow scientists to nail down mass, so getting spin as well would allow scientists to really get the goods on these light-gobbling monsters. "Supermassive black holes are elemental objects described only by their size and rotation," EHT team member Michael Johnson, also of the CfA, said during the April 10 event. Such in-depth observations would "allow ultraprecise tests of Einstein's theories, and even extraction of spin," Doeleman said.
And it could even enable the team to zoom in on a black hole's "photon ring," a bizarre structure that appears to contain an infinite, information-packed sequence of subrings. The next-gen EHT will bring even more black holes into range for the researchers. The modified megascope "will give us even sharper views and let us make the first movies of black holes," Doeleman said. The collaboration plans to double the number of constituent EHT telescopes, creating a "next-generation EHT" that will push discovery to the next level. But the project's ambitions don't end there. That just takes more time."Īdding Sgr A* to the photo album is a high priority for EHT team members, in part because they're keen to get a look at an object so different than M87's supermassive black hole. "So, we're developing new algorithms that can specifically address that, to add a time variability to the modeling. "One of the challenges for Sagittarius A* is that it does evolve so quickly during the course of an evening," Doeleman said. Sgr A* is a relatively lightweight supermassive black hole, harboring the mass of "only" 4.3 million suns, and therefore operates on shorter timescales than the 6.5-billion-solar-mass M87 monster. And Sgr A* is a tougher target still, even though it's much closer to us (26,000 light-years versus 55 million light-years for M87). Such work is painstaking and time-consuming for example, the M87 data that enabled last year's image were gathered in 2017. (Photographing a black hole's interior is impossible, unless you're in there yourself, which is not advised.) The team devises algorithms to make sense of all this information, integrating it to generate an image depicting the black hole's event horizon - the "point of no return" beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. The EHT combines data from eight radio telescopes around the world, which are linked to form a virtual megascope the size of Earth. Photographing a black hole is much more involved than just pointing and shooting. The EHT team has been observing Sgr A* but has not yet been able to generate an image from the data. The next big moment could involve our own Milky Way galaxy's supermassive black hole, which is known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short.
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