Scientists have successfully taken first ever picture of the shadow of a agujero negro providing direct observation of its immediate environment
Image taken from “EHTC, Akiyama K et al 2019, ‘First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Agujero Negro‘, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 875, no. L1.”
El super-masivo los agujeros negros were first predicted by Einstein in 1915 in his General Theory of Relativity when he showed gravity bends light. There have been many developments since then but never any direct evidence. Scientists were only able to detect them indirectly. The first real picture of the shadow of a super massive agujero negro has now been captured providing first direct evidence of their presence, thanks to ”The Event Horizon Telescopio Colaboración".
La los agujeros negros are extremely compressed mass in a very small region. Its gravity is so high that nothing at all escapes if gets too close to its boundary. The Event Horizon is the boundary around the agujero negro that marks what is inside and what is outside. Once anything crosses this boundary, it gets swallowed and can never come out. Agujeros negros swallow all light therefore they are invisible and cannot be seen or pictured.
The intense gravity of agujero negro attracts and pulls interstellar gas onto itself faster and faster. This heats up the gas immensely and light radiation is emitted. These emissions are warped into a circular ring by the gravity of the agujero negro.
A agujero negro itself is invisible but its shadow against super-heated gas cloud around it could be pictured.
Black hole’s presence couldn’t be directly observed uptill now mainly due to the fact that los agujeros negros are extremely small targets for the available radio telescopes which were not capable enough to observe their event horizon. Observing los agujeros negros directly needed building an ingenious telescope virtually the size of Earth.
It took about a decade to organise a network of telescopes called the ”Event Horizon Telescope” spanning the face of the Earth which combined eight separate telescopes in Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile and South Pole. All eight dishes of the telescope needed to be linked and pointed towards the agujero negro at exactly the same time. The signals received by the telescopes were combined by a correlator (a super computer) to give an image of the event horizon of the agujero negro.
El éxito de este experimento es un avance significativo en astronomía.
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{Puede leer el trabajo de investigación original haciendo clic en el enlace DOI que figura a continuación en la lista de fuentes citadas}
Fuentes)
1. EHTC, Akiyama K et al 2019. Resultados del primer telescopio de horizonte de eventos M87. I. La sombra del agujero negro supermasivo '. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 875 (L1) https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7
2. Instituto Max Planck de Radioastronomía, 2019. Primera imagen de un agujero negro. Obtenido de https://www.mpg.de/13337404/first-ever-picture-of-black-hole
3. BlackHoleCam, 2019. IMAGING THE EVENT HORIZON OF BLACK HOLES, Obtenido de https://blackholecam.org/
4. Comisión Europea - Comunicado de prensa, 2019. Científicos financiados por la UE revelan la primera imagen de un agujero negro. Obtenido de http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-2053_en.htm
