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Astronomers have set their telescopes towards a new target. They are trying to capture the first actual photo of a black hole. More exactly, they will be looking to snap a picture of Sagittarius A. This latter is the supermassive black hole situated at the center of the Milky Way.
This Could Be The Astronomers’ First Actual Look At A Black Hole
In order to achieve this feat, the specialist will be using the ALMA in Chile and seven other radio telescopes situated across the world. One of them, for example, can be found at the South Pole. ALMA or the Atacama Millimetre Array, as well as the seven others, will be targeting the same patch of night sky. They will be monitoring it for 10 days straight.
Spotting Sagittarius A will be quite a challenging task. Allegedly, astronomers would need a telescope 1,000 stronger than the Hubble Space Telescope so as to actually ‘see’ this black hole.
In order to achieve this goal, an international team of researchers united in a project known as Event Horizon Telescope. Through this, the astronomers will be trying to create a ‘virtual telescope’. This will actually be a collection of the observatories named above, all targeting the same patch in perfect timing.
Even if the project is successful, scientists will not actually take a picture of a black hole. This cannot be done as not even light can escape from it. Instead, the team is hoping the snap a photo or see the “swirling hot material around the black hole”. They are also hoping to see a ‘silhouette” imprinted in such a glow.
“The silhouette, that black region, that’s the actual black hole.”
This is all according to Dr. Alan Duffy. He is a Swinburne University astrophysicist involved with the project. Dr. Duffy compared the Event Horizon’s task to finding a CD on the Moon, although this black hole is about 3 to 4 million times bigger than the Sun.
Image Source: Wikimedia
