Big news everyone, big news...
Even if you are not into science or science fiction you must have heard about black holes - at least from the mass panic spread about CERN experiment and how scientists would create small blackholes - and one could potentially grow up and eat everything around us. Guess what - they were wrong!
Science - 1 : PseudoScience/flat earthers - 0
However point of this post is not about CERN and flat-earthers being flat-headed and stuff like that... It's actually that tomorrow we will get to see FIRST EVER IMAGE OF THE BLACK HOLE, and it is the one nearest to us in Sagitarrius A*, which is the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy!!!
Doesn't that sounds exciting?
Now lets be clear, it is called black for a reason(we have no idea what is inside of it) -no light comes out of it, hence, you can't take a picture of it, you dummy.
But how, why? What will we going to see if we point some telescope in it - if you can't take a picture of it?!
Well, we can see things around it - you see black hole draws everything towards it, but I won't go into too many details about space-time and all that stuff - here are two images where you can see - black (nothing comes out of it) - BUT, on the event horizon photon sphere can be created - where photons have just enough energy to escape falling into the black hole, but can't escape its gravitational pull - so they orbit around it.
Something similar as the Earth orbits around the Sun.
There are many simulations about black holes, photon spheres, jets, black holes eating stars, merging black holes and all the funny stuff in the space.
The interesting fact here is that the best black hole simulation ever is one we have seen in the Interstellar movie, yep... that one is revolutionary, however we won't be able to observe Gargantua because it is so far away from us, at least for some time. :)
More modest one is done by Andrew Chael from Event Horizon Telescope team, and you can check it out on youtube.
Event Horizon Telescope
EHT is VLBI (Very large Baseline Interferometry) of many independant radio telescopes, synchronised and virtually used as the ONE telescope with a dish diameter of an entire Earth... Now this tasks requires supercomputers, atomic clocks syncing, LOTS AND LOTS OF DATA... which can't be transfered by interned - but hard drives are packed and sent to one center for more calculation, convolution and data reduction - awesome technology.
If you are interested in this stuff, I might be willing to inside of this matter very deeply (since I'm currently working on few radio interferometers). :)
To cut all this nonsense...
Tomorrow! at 13:00 UTC time data will be published - and you can watch the press conference live on Youtube.
That's all for now. What an interesting time to be alive! :)
More details about the simulations and telescope you can find here.
