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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Fri Mar 20, 2020, 06:04 AM Mar 2020

Scientists Have Found A Way To Take Razor-Sharp Images Of Black Holes





Alfredo Carpineti
By Alfredo Carpineti
19 MAR 2020, 18:02

Last April, using telescopes scattered across the surface of the Earth, astronomers captured the first image of a black hole. The achievement was possible thanks to combining all the observatories into a single one the size of Earth, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

The incredible image is also an incredible test for our physical theories and new calculations described in Science Advances suggest that observatories may soon be able to take an even sharper image of a black hole. What they need to focus on is the photon ring.

Most of the image that we saw is produced by photons that were simply deflected by the black hole, but some of them got close enough around the black hole to orbit it a few times. These form the photon ring. The closer they got, the more times they orbited it. The more they orbit, the sharper the view that can be obtained.

"The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," lead author Michael Johnson of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian said in a statement. "Each successive ring has about the same diameter but becomes increasingly sharper because its light orbited the black hole more times before reaching the observer. With the current EHT image, we've caught just a glimpse of the full complexity that should emerge in the image of any black hole."

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-have-found-a-way-to-take-razorsharp-images-of-black-holes/
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Scientists Have Found A Way To Take Razor-Sharp Images Of Black Holes (Original Post) Judi Lynn Mar 2020 OP
'Infinite subrings' may be next frontier for photographing black holes Judi Lynn Mar 2020 #1

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
1. 'Infinite subrings' may be next frontier for photographing black holes
Fri Mar 20, 2020, 06:17 AM
Mar 2020

By Mike Wall - Space.com Senior Writer 14 hours ago

Peering so deeply would require adding a space component to the Event Horizon Telescope.



The Event Horizon Telescope captured this image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow that's in the center of the galaxy M87.
(Image: © Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

Black-hole photography could be even more powerful and revelatory than scientists had thought.

Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project unveiled the first-ever imagery of a black hole, laying bare the supermassive monster at the heart of the galaxy M87. The landmark photos have opened new doors, allowing scientists to probe exotic space-time realms like never before.

And that probing may go much deeper still in the not-too-distant future. The most prominent feature in the EHT imagery, a bright but unresolved ring around M87's supermassive black hole, likely contains a thin "photon ring" that is composed of an infinite sequence of subrings, a new study reports.

The intricate structure of this photon ring holds a treasure trove of information about the black hole — information that scientists can access by extending the EHT's reach a bit, study team members said.

"Black holes are giving us this gift, this signal unlike anything that's been studied in astronomy," said lead author Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/supermassive-black-hole-photon-ring-eht-photo.html
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