Astronomers record black hole at work for the first time

Astronomers from the international project “Event Horizon Telescope” (EHT) are preparing to record the first-ever video of a black hole. As reported by The Guardian, 12 telescopes across the Earth will observe the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 in March and April 2024. In 2019, scientists already obtained an image of this black hole’s shadow.

This time, the researchers’ goal is to capture the rotation of material around the event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape, including light. Professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge, Sarah Markoff, noted that this study will allow a deeper understanding of the black hole’s rotation speed and the mechanisms by which these objects form powerful jets that emanate from the centers of some galaxies.

“We hope to answer key questions: how fast a black hole spins and how it creates jets,” said a scientist who participated in the creation of the EHT project. According to her, although black holes are often thought of as “evil vacuum cleaners” that suck up everything, they actually help us understand how the first galaxies formed and evolved.

The EHT project is a global network of telescopes located on different continents – from Antarctica to Spain and South Korea. In 2019, the team published the first-ever image of a black hole’s shadow, which was a huge achievement in the study of these mysterious objects.