The first shot of a black hole can reconcile the theory of relativity and quantum physics.
On Wednesday night, 120 astronomers from 8 observatories on four continents launched the first attempt to take a picture of a black hole. Shooting began on April 5 and will last until April 14 of this year. The object of observation was the neighborhood of two supermassive black holes, one in the center of our Milky Way, the other in the neighboring galaxy Messier 87. The first is close, but small in diameter, the second is very far, but huge. Whose is better to make out - while the question. The nearest Sagittarius A * ( Sagittarius A * ) is located in the center of our Milky Way galaxy for a distance of 26 thousand light years. The furthest is 6 billion times the mass of our luminary, therefore the horizon of events around it is larger. Sagittarius A * with a mass of 1.5 thousand times smaller and fits in a space smaller than the volume inside the orbit of Mercury.
What is the importance of observation explains Gopal Narayanan, a research professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst: “At the heart of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the idea that quantum mechanics and general theory of relativity can be combined, that there is a great, unified theory of fundamental concepts. The black hole event horizon is the place where this possible merger is best studied. "We will know the results only in 2018, when computers process the data. At the end of the post, there is a suggested image that we should see if Einstein's theory is correct.
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To observe the horizons of events from the scattered radio telescopes, which examine each of their sections of the sky, astronomers created a virtual radio telescope the size of the Earth. 8 observatories in 6 territorial points are shooting.
The project involved the Observatory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the leading organization), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Joint Observatory ALMA (Chile), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Institute of Radio Astronomy. Max Planck (Germany), University of Concepcion (Chile), Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Central Academy of Taiwan (ASIAA, Taiwan), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Onsala Observatory (Sweden). Integration of radio telescopes is important for observing rapid processes in the Universe, which include, for example, supernova explosions and cosmic radiation fluxes, as well as for detailed studies of small distant space objects such as Strelets A * black hole. The capabilities of the most powerful optical telescopes are limited in observing even the most massive objects, and black holes are extremely compact.
Binding together the power of radio telescopes located in different parts of the globe, scientists, astronomers were able to examine extremely distant space objects with a sharpness two million times greater than the sharpness of human vision. If a man had such a vision, he would see a grapefruit or a compact disc lying on the moon.
The launch of this “virtual” telescope called Event Horizon Telescope has led to the development of interferometry technology with a long base (Very Long Baseline Interferometry, VLBI) over the past twenty years. The largest millimeter radio telescope of the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory on the Chachnantor highland plateau in Chile, operates on the same model, and it also participates in the project. In the EHT project from April 5 to 14, the VLBI technology turns all telescopes connected to it into a huge telescope, the size of our planet. The capacities of the world's most sensitive radio observatories in Chile, Spain, California, Arizona, the Hawaiian Islands and the South Pole of the Earth were combined. The largest of them, the aforementioned ALMA, consists of 54 parabolic antennas of 12 meters diameter and 12 plates with a diameter of 7 meters.
Another intriguing idea that can be explored in this experiment is the so-called “information paradox”. This phenomenon is Stephen Hawking’s prediction that matter caught in a black hole cannot be lost outside the known universe, that it must somehow flow back. Here to see how it flows and want astronomers. Energy or information leaving a black hole by means of Hawking radiation is a quantum effect. Scientists regularly see the outflow of large plasma jets from the center of galaxies, where black holes are assumed or there are. If there is a connection between black holes and these jets (or other leaks of information and energy), then the true horizons of events in the strict sense of the collapsed objects in our Universe are not formed.
You cannot see the black hole itself, but the substance falling into it is possible. Dust, gas and the nearest stars create around the black holes a high-energy region, or the so-called accretion disk , in which matter contracts and twists, as in a funnel, and warms up. Due to high energies, matter begins to glow brightly near the “event horizon” - the frontier, after which the black hole does not let go of any radiation and information from itself. Thus, we see an image of matter “eaten up” by a black hole, a certain shadow of a black hole.
The modern standard cosmological model ΛCDM (“Lambda-SidiEm”) suggests that the general theory of relativity is the correct theory of gravity on cosmological scales and our location in the Universe is not particularly distinguished, that is, on a sufficiently large scale, the Universe looks the same in all directions (isotropy) and from each place (uniformity). This, too, can be confirmed or disproved.
Black holes combine the properties described by the two main physical theories of our time - the theory of general relativity (the theory of large structures) and quantum mechanics (the theory of small distances). The huge mass of the black hole requires the application of the general theory of relativity to describe the curvature of space-time caused by it. But the small size of the black hole and internal processes require the use of quantum mechanics. Until now, it was not possible to combine both these theories. Combining theories leads to unnatural equations - for example, the infinite density of a black hole follows from them. Earlier in 2015, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) telescope had already measured magnetic fields in the vicinity of this black hole, but their structure was extremely unusual - the magnetic field strength in some regions of the disk changed every 15 minutes, and its configuration was very different in different parts.
According to some calculations of the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, we can see a “crescent” of light surrounding an absolutely black “drop” in the photographs. This light is emitted by matter right before the moment when it passes through the border of the black hole event horizon. On the horizon of the events of Sagittarius A * scientists expect to see a lot of flashes. These point flashes are periodically generated there with a high frequency - once a day. On the basis of past observations, several observatories observed something similar to flashes - the clarification of emissions from Sagittarius A *. As a result of current research, astronomers will be able to track their origin and watch the process of their reduction.
With a successful development of events, hot spots will become a marker of the structure of a temporary space in this strong gravitational region. “This opens the door to the possibility of conducting tomography of a temporary space - these spots move, they arise in various fields of observation,” said earlier at the EHT presentation Avery Broderick, an associate professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. “There are only two places in the universe where you can study strong gravity on a large, very large scale and around compact objects,” he recalls.
If we see something that is fundamentally different from what we expect, physicists will have to revise, for example, the theory of gravity.
The first pictures of the black hole, which we can see with you, will not appear until 2018. In the meantime, we will look at what we can approximately see in these images, built as a result of computer modeling.
Combining data and creating a general picture using measurements of the telescope of the event horizon is an incorrect task, because each of the results contains an infinite number of possible images explaining the data obtained. The task of astronomers is to find an explanation that takes into account these preliminary assumptions, while satisfying the observed data. The angular resolution of the telescope, which is necessary to obtain a sufficient amount of data, requires overcoming many problems and makes it difficult to unambiguously reconstruct the image. For example, at the observed wavelengths, rapidly changing inhomogeneities in the atmosphere introduce measurement errors. Reliable algorithms that are able to restore images in the mode of fine angular resolution are constantly searched.
So far, the task of cleaning, interpreting and mixing the obtained data into one high-resolution image is performed by the CHIRP (Continuous High-Resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors) algorithm, developed by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, if you are sufficiently versed in physics and mathematics, the CHIRP authors have published simple online tools for such scholars on the MIT website , through which anyone with programming skills can create and test their own version of the Event Horizon telescope. Suddenly, you can see the problem from a completely unconventional angle and suggest a unique method for solving it. I really did not find reward information. But maybe looking bad.
In the toolbox:
About the preparation of the telescope EHT Geektimes already wrote last year
What is the importance of observation explains Gopal Narayanan, a research professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst: “At the heart of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the idea that quantum mechanics and general theory of relativity can be combined, that there is a great, unified theory of fundamental concepts. The black hole event horizon is the place where this possible merger is best studied. "We will know the results only in 2018, when computers process the data. At the end of the post, there is a suggested image that we should see if Einstein's theory is correct.
')
To observe the horizons of events from the scattered radio telescopes, which examine each of their sections of the sky, astronomers created a virtual radio telescope the size of the Earth. 8 observatories in 6 territorial points are shooting.
The project involved the Observatory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the leading organization), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Joint Observatory ALMA (Chile), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Institute of Radio Astronomy. Max Planck (Germany), University of Concepcion (Chile), Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Central Academy of Taiwan (ASIAA, Taiwan), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Onsala Observatory (Sweden). Integration of radio telescopes is important for observing rapid processes in the Universe, which include, for example, supernova explosions and cosmic radiation fluxes, as well as for detailed studies of small distant space objects such as Strelets A * black hole. The capabilities of the most powerful optical telescopes are limited in observing even the most massive objects, and black holes are extremely compact.
Binding together the power of radio telescopes located in different parts of the globe, scientists, astronomers were able to examine extremely distant space objects with a sharpness two million times greater than the sharpness of human vision. If a man had such a vision, he would see a grapefruit or a compact disc lying on the moon.
The launch of this “virtual” telescope called Event Horizon Telescope has led to the development of interferometry technology with a long base (Very Long Baseline Interferometry, VLBI) over the past twenty years. The largest millimeter radio telescope of the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory on the Chachnantor highland plateau in Chile, operates on the same model, and it also participates in the project. In the EHT project from April 5 to 14, the VLBI technology turns all telescopes connected to it into a huge telescope, the size of our planet. The capacities of the world's most sensitive radio observatories in Chile, Spain, California, Arizona, the Hawaiian Islands and the South Pole of the Earth were combined. The largest of them, the aforementioned ALMA, consists of 54 parabolic antennas of 12 meters diameter and 12 plates with a diameter of 7 meters.
Another intriguing idea that can be explored in this experiment is the so-called “information paradox”. This phenomenon is Stephen Hawking’s prediction that matter caught in a black hole cannot be lost outside the known universe, that it must somehow flow back. Here to see how it flows and want astronomers. Energy or information leaving a black hole by means of Hawking radiation is a quantum effect. Scientists regularly see the outflow of large plasma jets from the center of galaxies, where black holes are assumed or there are. If there is a connection between black holes and these jets (or other leaks of information and energy), then the true horizons of events in the strict sense of the collapsed objects in our Universe are not formed.
Is Einstein right?
You cannot see the black hole itself, but the substance falling into it is possible. Dust, gas and the nearest stars create around the black holes a high-energy region, or the so-called accretion disk , in which matter contracts and twists, as in a funnel, and warms up. Due to high energies, matter begins to glow brightly near the “event horizon” - the frontier, after which the black hole does not let go of any radiation and information from itself. Thus, we see an image of matter “eaten up” by a black hole, a certain shadow of a black hole.
The modern standard cosmological model ΛCDM (“Lambda-SidiEm”) suggests that the general theory of relativity is the correct theory of gravity on cosmological scales and our location in the Universe is not particularly distinguished, that is, on a sufficiently large scale, the Universe looks the same in all directions (isotropy) and from each place (uniformity). This, too, can be confirmed or disproved.
Black holes combine the properties described by the two main physical theories of our time - the theory of general relativity (the theory of large structures) and quantum mechanics (the theory of small distances). The huge mass of the black hole requires the application of the general theory of relativity to describe the curvature of space-time caused by it. But the small size of the black hole and internal processes require the use of quantum mechanics. Until now, it was not possible to combine both these theories. Combining theories leads to unnatural equations - for example, the infinite density of a black hole follows from them. Earlier in 2015, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) telescope had already measured magnetic fields in the vicinity of this black hole, but their structure was extremely unusual - the magnetic field strength in some regions of the disk changed every 15 minutes, and its configuration was very different in different parts.
According to some calculations of the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, we can see a “crescent” of light surrounding an absolutely black “drop” in the photographs. This light is emitted by matter right before the moment when it passes through the border of the black hole event horizon. On the horizon of the events of Sagittarius A * scientists expect to see a lot of flashes. These point flashes are periodically generated there with a high frequency - once a day. On the basis of past observations, several observatories observed something similar to flashes - the clarification of emissions from Sagittarius A *. As a result of current research, astronomers will be able to track their origin and watch the process of their reduction.
With a successful development of events, hot spots will become a marker of the structure of a temporary space in this strong gravitational region. “This opens the door to the possibility of conducting tomography of a temporary space - these spots move, they arise in various fields of observation,” said earlier at the EHT presentation Avery Broderick, an associate professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. “There are only two places in the universe where you can study strong gravity on a large, very large scale and around compact objects,” he recalls.
If we see something that is fundamentally different from what we expect, physicists will have to revise, for example, the theory of gravity.
The first pictures of the black hole, which we can see with you, will not appear until 2018. In the meantime, we will look at what we can approximately see in these images, built as a result of computer modeling.
Combining data and creating a general picture using measurements of the telescope of the event horizon is an incorrect task, because each of the results contains an infinite number of possible images explaining the data obtained. The task of astronomers is to find an explanation that takes into account these preliminary assumptions, while satisfying the observed data. The angular resolution of the telescope, which is necessary to obtain a sufficient amount of data, requires overcoming many problems and makes it difficult to unambiguously reconstruct the image. For example, at the observed wavelengths, rapidly changing inhomogeneities in the atmosphere introduce measurement errors. Reliable algorithms that are able to restore images in the mode of fine angular resolution are constantly searched.
So far, the task of cleaning, interpreting and mixing the obtained data into one high-resolution image is performed by the CHIRP (Continuous High-Resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors) algorithm, developed by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, if you are sufficiently versed in physics and mathematics, the CHIRP authors have published simple online tools for such scholars on the MIT website , through which anyone with programming skills can create and test their own version of the Event Horizon telescope. Suddenly, you can see the problem from a completely unconventional angle and suggest a unique method for solving it. I really did not find reward information. But maybe looking bad.
In the toolbox:
- A set of integrated training data
- Real Data Dimension Set
- Standardized data set for testing image recovery algorithms
- Interactive quantitative assessment of the efficiency of the algorithm on the simulated test data
- Qualitative comparison of the performance of the algorithm for the reconstruction of real data
- Online form stand for simulating realistic data using your own image parameters and a telescope
About the preparation of the telescope EHT Geektimes already wrote last year
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/402975/
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