![]() ![]() ![]() Parking is available in the 6th Street garage. The event features key members of the science team and takes place at the Natural Resources Building 2, Room 120, 1064 East Lowell St., Tucson. "As with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning," he said.įor those who want to learn more, the UA will hold a free lecture on the efforts required to photograph black holes at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 17. Two more telescopes are being added to the network, one in Greenland and another at Kitt Peak National Observatory, which is southwest of Tucson. "It's really a confluence of everything just lining up in 2017 to be able to run this project," Psaltis said in an interview with The Arizona Republic and earlier this week.Īs scientists zero in on taking precision images of black holes, the work represents a new field of research in astronomy and physics.ĭoeleman, the director of the Event Horizon Telescope, said they expect to get even sharper pictures in the future. Even five years ago, it would have been impossible. Wednesday's announcement represented decades of work for some of the key scientists.ĭimitrios Psaltis, a UA professor of astronomy and physics and the Event Horizon Telescope's project scientist, began writing scientific papers 20 years ago about what it would take to photograph a black hole. Or put another way: A life worth of "selfie" pictures for 40,000 people. Then scientists could analyze and reconstruct the images.Įnough to keep a playlist of high-quality mp3 files going for 5,000 years. The observations produced an enormous amount of data that had to be stored on hard drives and then flown to Germany and Massachusetts where it was distilled to a more usable volume by supercomputers. The data collection had to be timed precisely using atomic clocks that lose only one second every 10 million years. The eight telescopes, on different continents, were synced to collect radio waves from the black hole over several nights. View Gallery: Arizona's contributions to space exploration In April 2017 they got lucky the first three days of observations included some of the best weather they had ever seen, he said. They had to wait for good weather at several sites at once, including Hawaii, Spain, Arizona, Chile and the South Pole. Their last test was in January 2017, and by March they were ready to go. Researchers spent years testing the telescopes and pairing them to make sure the observations would work. His work involved annual trips to the South Pole where he spent as many as eight weeks in the harsh environment. The UA played a key role in the international collaboration that involved 200 people in more than 20 countries or regions. Researchers at the UA integrated two of the eight telescopes used for the Event Horizon Telescope, one on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona and another at the South Pole.ĭaniel Marrone, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, helped integrate the two telescopes by installing special hardware and atomic clocks so the network of telescopes could be synced precisely. On Wednesday, they published a series of scientific papers and released four images that show the shadow of a black hole surrounded by a brilliant yellow border called an "event horizon." The observations were made over four days in April 2017, and a team involving more than 200 researchers spent the last two years analyzing and studying the data. It's a network of eight telescopes, including two affiliated with the University of Arizona, that were combined into a single "virtual" telescope to observe the black hole. That's where the Event Horizon Telescope comes in. The black hole is so distant that viewing it is the equivalent of trying to read a newspaper in Los Angeles while sitting in New York City. Scientists have long wanted to take a picture of one. But until a few years ago, they lacked a powerful enough telescope. Black holes are objects with a gravity field so strong that light cannot escape, and astronomers believe that supermassive black holes exist at the center of almost all galaxies. ![]()
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