New Observatory Technology --"Puts the Shadow of the Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole within Reach"The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy
« "Pillars of Creation" --An 'Illusion' Vaporized by a Supernova Explosion 6,000 Years Ago (Today's Most Popular) |Main| "The Electric Universe" --A New NASA Mission »July 18, 2012 New Observatory Technology --"Puts the Shadow of the Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole within Reach"
Astronomers connected APEX, in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT)in Arizona, were able to make the sharpest direct observation ever, of the center of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279, which contains a supermassive black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us.
APEX is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the Onsala Space Observatory and ESO. APEX is a pathfinder for the next-generation submillimetre telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is being built and operated on the same plateau.The telescopes were linked using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). Larger telescopes can make sharper observations, and interferometry allows multiple telescopes to act like a single telescope as large as the separation -- or "baseline" -- between them.
Using VLBI, the sharpest observations can be achieved by making the separation between telescopes as large as possible. For their quasar observations, the team used the three telescopes to create an interferometer with transcontinental baseline lengths of 9447 km from Chile to Hawaii, 7174 km from Chile to Arizona and 4627 km from Arizona to Hawaii. Connecting APEX in Chile (below) to the network was crucial, as it contributed the longest baselines.
The observations were made in radio waves with a wavelength of 1.3 millimetres. This is the first time observations at a wavelength as short as this have been made using such long baselines. The observations achieved a sharpness, or angular resolution, of just 28 microarcseconds -- about 8 billionths of a degree. This represents the ability to distinguish details an amazing two million times sharper than human vision. Observations this sharp can probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar -- a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.
The observations represent a new milestone towards imaging supermassive black holes and the regions around them. In future it is planned to connect even more telescopes in this way to create the so-called Event Horizon Telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope will be able to image the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, as well as others in nearby galaxies. The shadow -- a dark region seen against a brighter background -- is caused by the bending of light by the black hole, and would be the first direct observational evidence for the existence of a black hole's event horizon, the boundary from within which not even light can escape.
The experiment marks the first time that APEX has taken part in VLBI observations, and is the culmination of three years hard work at APEX's high altitude site on the 5000-metre plateau of Chajnantor in the Chilean Andes, where the atmospheric pressure is only about half that at sea level. To make APEX ready for VLBI, scientists from Germany and Sweden installed new digital data acquisition systems, a very precise atomic clock, and pressurised data recorders capable of recording 4 gigabits per second for many hours under challenging environmental conditions. The data -- 4 terabytes from each telescope -- were shipped to Germany on hard drives and processed at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn.
The successful addition of APEX is also important for another reason. It shares its location and many aspects of its technology with the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. ALMA is currently under construction and will finally consist of 54 dishes with the same 12-metre diameter as APEX, plus 12 smaller dishes with a diameter of 7 metres.
The possibility of connecting ALMA to the network is currently being studied. With the vastly increased collecting area of ALMA's dishes, the observations could achieve 10 times better sensitivity than these initial tests. This would put the shadow of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole within reach for future observations.
The image below is from two different telescopes that simultaneously observed violent flares from the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. The outbursts from this region, known as Sagittarius A*, reveal material being stretched like bread dough out as it orbits in the intense gravity close to the central black hole. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, both in Chile, to study light from Sagittarius A* at near-infrared wavelengths and the longer submillimeter wavelengths, astronomers have for the first time concurrently caught a flare with these telescopes.
“Observations like this, over a range of wavelengths, are really the only way to understand what’s going on close to the black hole,” says Andreas Eckart of the University of Cologne, who led the team.
The Daily Galaxy via ESO
Posted at 09:30 AM | PermalinkComments
Dude makes a ll kinds of sense man wow.
www.Need-Anon.it.tc
Posted by:ZundoRannYankDenn |July 18, 2012 at 06:17 PMAMAZING TECHNOLOGY INDEED!
- It’s just a great pity that astrophysicists and cosmologist and theoretical mathematicians are stock in the “ancient gravity cosmology” that hinders them to grasp the real dynamics of their observations.
Quote: “The Event Horizon Telescope will be able to image the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, as well as others in nearby galaxies. The shadow -- a dark region seen against a brighter background -- is caused by the bending of light by the black hole, and would be the first direct observational evidence for the existence of a black hole's event horizon, the boundary from within which not even light can escape”.
AD: This typical flattish modern 2 D description of cosmic movements is just ridiculous and unworthy a modern science.
Something does not appear from nowhere (Big Bang) and disappear to nowhere in some “black hole”, but everything is going in circuits via the natural and basically forces of atmospheric dynamics; thermodynamics; hydrodynamics; electrodynamics; magnetodynamics and nuclear dynamics – that all can act as contracting or expanding forces in a local formation of molecular gas and particles.
A much more possible 3 D dynamical explanation can be seen on this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lggn6rbqPA4
Or one can just imagine the fertilization of an egg cell and the mitosis and meiosis of a cell formation and division, it´s all the very same formational processes.
Ivar Nielsen
Natural Philosopher
No such things as black holes. Plain and simple. Let's move on to real science, not make believe unscientific theories.
Posted by:Gavin |July 19, 2012 at 01:44 PMWow guys, way to show ignorance. Why would you say there is no such thing as black holes? What evidence do you have to support that?
And a 2D description of an event horizon is fairly sound for the purposes of public knowledge - the accretion disk of matter falling into the black hole, created by the object's spin, rather does neccessarily result in an almost flay image. Of course, the event horizon would be spherical, but any material falling in from above or below, even travelling at light speed, would likely be forced into the accretion disk before being consumed.
It's the same reason the planets orbit on roughly the same plane - conservation of angular momentum and centrifugal force.
Posted by:Badgerchap |July 20, 2012 at 04:03 AM@Badgerchap,
"Black holes" are said to have a huge force of attraction and are even cosmologically described as being "objects".
This is all non sense, because these swirling centre leads into a funnel and towards the centre of the galaxies where further formation of gas and particles takes place.
There is no major local attractive force located anywhere in a galaxy because it all moves fluent in a 3 D cell-like circuit. The term "black hole" is therefore genually wrong. And together with it, also "the attached huge amount of mass"
This is why "the galactic rotation anomaly" was found by observations. And why the scientists had to invent "dark matter" in order to save the hypothesis of "celestial law of objects orbiting a gravity centre" which evidently doesn´t apply to galaxies - if at all.
It is very strange that cosmologists use the same celestial gravitation laws in galaxies and in our solar system when the movements obviously aren´t alike.
Of course you can compare the orbital plane in a galactic disc to our solar system, but the orbiting movements of the objects in galaxies and in the solar system are very different and they obviously don’t obey the same celestial laws.
Hmm.
Posted by:Ruth Mc |July 23, 2012 at 06:53 AMPost a comment
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