Scientists and astronomers around the globe have been working on a joint project called the ‘Event Horizon Telescope’, aiming to be the first to ever capture an image of a black hole’s event horizon. Their success in this endeavour would be pathbreaking, given that no part of a black hole has ever been physically observed.
Black holes have continued to be an enigma, ever since they were first predicted mathematically by Karl Schwarzchild in 1915. These are extremely dense regions in space -- dense to the point that their gravitational pull is so immense that nothing escapes them, not even light (hence the name.) Also, why were they ‘predicted mathematically’ and not observed practically, you ask? That’s because nobody ever has. Black holes, classically detected at the center of galaxies owing to their gravitational influence on the stars orbiting it, represent a conundrum that has baffled the mightiest of academic minds: from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking. They are a celestial phenomenon that have until now only been theoretically proposed to exist based on scientific observations of how light waves ‘bend’ as they travel past large bodies in space like planets, stars and galaxies.
The new Event Horizon Telescope could change that. It is not one telescope but a collection scattered across the globe. These aren’t optical telescopes -- the kind that use visible light for observation -- but radio telescopes that are sensitive to millimetre wavelengths radio waves; the kind that emanate from black holes. The collection of radio telescopes that comprise this ‘virtual telescope’ include scopes from nine stations around the Earth, from individual telescopes to arrays in Chile, Hawaii, Mexico, Spain, Arizona and Antarctica.
While the combined power of radio telescopes has been put to the test in the past, they’ve been found lacking the resolution (the ability to discern detail) required for observing black holes. However the addition of two powerful new arrays -- the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in Chile and the South Pole Telescope -- will bring it up to snuff. It’ll be like moving from watching a television broadcast from the 1980s to watching a high-definition movie on a modern-day flat screen TV.
Over the past several decades, astronomers and scientists have had the ability to observe space using far more sensitive systems. Projects like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) which shot to fame in 2016 for first detecting the presence of gravitational waves, took them ever closer to understanding these supermassive celestial bodies. The LIGO experiment delivered tangible proof of ripples in space-time, triggered by a pair of medium-sized black holes that coalesced millions of years ago.
With the addition of the Event Horizon Telescope, scientists now the ability to observe detail at unprecedented levels -- comparable to an Earthly observer being able to discern a grape on the surface of the moon. This level of power is expected to lend astronomers and physicists the ability to actually observe details of a black hole’s event horizon: the border beyond which nothing escapes, and where known laws of physics cease to apply. Insights from such observations could have a profound effect on our understanding of astrophysics, our understanding of the origins of our universe, and in finally understanding the implications of Einstein’s space-time.
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