April this year signified a historic first picture of a black hole courtesy of the EHT, or Event Horizon Telescope. The telescope is actually a series of locations on Earth that triangulate a signal into the deep unknown. The image below is one that will remain a monumental achievement for mankind, a black hole with a mass of 6.5 billion of our suns.
Their encore, however, is more ambitious than ever and hopes to include more locations on Earth to strengthen the signal and generate a video of the black hole in the centre of our galaxy.
If the EHT team can see a black hole in real-time we can begin to understand how jets expel massive amounts of energy from it's north and south poles and how the hole reacts to the surrounding galaxy.
Included in this is how black holes swallow large amounts of matter and test Einstein's theory of gravity.
By creating a photo of the black hole M87 in April, the data collected is was half a ton of hard drives.
The video footage is expected to take up to ten times this amount.
"It's very likely that we may be able to start making rudimentary movies over the next five years or so. They might be jerky. They might be low-resolution, but they would be the first steps," said Shep Doeleman, astronomer and leader of the EHT team, said.
"Imagine you could see the black hole during one of those periods of activity. You'd see exactly where that emission was coming from,
Understanding how these things happen – it tells us everything about the black hole dynamics and how they feed."
Are you as excited as us about sucky doughnuts in the deep unknown?
Then remember to share with a friend to spread ARSE far and wide...
#Space_Aus
