The concept of a black hole, where gravity is so strong it
sucks in everything coming close to it…even photons of light…seemed the subject
of science fiction not many years ago. Black
holes were first suggested by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Decades of research and observations have provided evidence of their existence,
but it has never been possible to directly observe and image one.
Enter the
latest proposed attempt to photograph a black hole.
Fifty radio telescopes scattered around the globe,
including the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, telescopes on
Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave
Astronomy in California. and several radio telescopes in Europe.
Sheperd Doeleman,
assistant director of the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and the lead researcher on the project, called the Event Horizon
Telescope, said "In essence, we are making a virtual telescope with a
mirror that is as big as the Earth," http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/19/astronomers-aim-to-take-first-picture-black-hole/
The target of the effort may be a black hole in our galaxy,
Sgr A*, which is estimated to contain a mass equivalent to 4
million suns. Although it's invisible, the effect of its gravity on
surrounding stars has been seen, some of which orbit this monstrous black hole
at speeds of more than 600 miles per second. Below
is an artist’s image of what it might look like.
Although it is too
far away for such an undertaking, M81 is a galaxy that astronomers believe harbors
a supermassive black hole as well. Obviously, my equipment could only image the
galaxy. Below is an image I took a couple of years ago with my old equipment
(14” Meade and the SBIG 11K CCD camera.)
