Images of black holes expected within a year

AUSTIN, Texas — After years of global efforts, the first-ever images of our own galaxy’s central black hole are expected to be released within this year, according to scientists working on the Block Hole Initiative.

“We’re very optimistic that it will succeed. We’ve done almost everything,” Sheperd Doeleman, a senior astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told a conference session of the ongoing 10-day South by Southwest festival, a platform that gathers innovators and entrepreneurs from across the globe to discuss new ideas.

Doeleman, assistant director of the center’s Black Hole Initiative, said that the remaining work involves testing and double checking what have been obtained; after that, the images will be finalized and officially announced sometime in 2019.

According to four scientists who delivered speeches at the conference session, the expected images are products of the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. EHT is a global effort to construct an Earth-sized virtual telescope array, able to actually “photograph” nearby supermassive black holes. It had its first full run in April 2017, collected data on black holes with eight telescopes around the world, including one in the South Pole.

“We have a goal of seeing something that struggles with all of its might to be unseen, and we’re pushing the technology as far as we can go,” Doeleman said.

Sera Markoff, professor of theoretical astrophysics and astroparticle physics at the University of Amsterdam, said that the EHT images will be the first real bird’s-eye view, which should help to clarify how the black hole can profoundly impact the largest structures in the universe.

Predicted almost a century ago by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, black holes not only exist, but actually power some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe.

Dimitrios Psaltis, professor of astronomy and physics of the University of Arizona, said that it feels like going to a new place for the very first time. “Nothing will take away the excitement that we are going to feel.”

He said the project can test Einstein’s predictions. “What if the black holes are not really what we think they are, what if Einstein’s theory of general relativity does not work so well in the solar system?” he said.