Astronomers this morning are set to unveil the first image of a black hole using the combined power of a global network of telescopes, including two from Hawaii.
The image, made public at 3:07 a.m. today Hawaii time, shows a fuzzy ring of light swirling around the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy nearly 54 million light-years from Earth.
“It’s a historic moment,” declared Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, one of two Mauna Kea observatories that joined six others from across the globe to collect the imaging data two years ago.
Press conferences announcing the discovery were scheduled to be held simultaneously this morning in Brussels, Shanghai, Tokyo, Taiwan, Denmark, Chile and Washington, D.C.
Black holes — incredibly dense and with gravitational fields so intense nothing can escape from it — were predicted almost a century ago by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
“We were pretty sure black holes were out there,” Dempsey said Tuesday in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “But pretty sure isn’t the same as certain. Now we’re certain.”
The East Asian Observatory’s James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Submillimeter Array, an eight-dish radio interferometer operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, are the two Hawaii telescopes involved in the worldwide project. Other observatories are atop mountains in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Arizona and the Antarctic.
Collectively, they are known as the Event Horizon Telescope — an Earth-size virtual telescope array capable of imaging nearby supermassive black holes.
The group of telescopes, powered by some 200 scientists, launched their imaging survey over five relatively dry days in April 2017.
“So many astronomers came to Hawaii from all over the world. Our control room at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope isn’t very large compared to others, but it was extremely crowded. It was very exciting,” Dempsey said.
Each telescope in the global array collected hundreds of terabytes of data and shipped them to a central location, where a supercomputer processed the data. Thirteen groups of scientists examined the information separately and arrived at similar conclusions about what was seen.
Dempsey said the image isn’t as spectacular as some of the colorful artist renderings of black holes in popular media.
“Hollywood has a higher budget. The resolution — it’s not going to be quite as crisp, not yet. As we get to the higher wavelengths and we get our technology better, this image is only going to get sharper and, in my opinion, more beautiful,” she said.
The M87 black hole is bigger than our solar system and 6 billion times the mass of our sun.
“It’s incredibly dense,” she said. “If you took the earth and made it into a black hole, it would be smaller than a kukui nut — all of that mass in that tiny little space.”
A second target for the Event Horizon Telescope imaging event in April 2017 was Sagittarius A, a supermassive black hole 26,000 light-years away from Earth at the center of our own galaxy. Dempsey said data for that black hole is still being processed.
Dempsey said the technology used for the Event Horizon Telescope was pioneered in Hawaii in 2007, when the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Submillimeter Array were linked together.
“It was the test of the proof of concept that we could do it at this wavelength,” she said.
It didn’t take long for the idea to expand, allowing radio telescopes to join up across the globe.
“The testing and technology in Hawaii was critical to that. I kind of like to think of it as the birthplace of the experiment,” she said.
With the M87 galaxy black hole photographed, scientists in Hawaii approached Larry Kimura, University of Hawaii-Hilo Hawaiian-language professor, about naming the object in Hawaiian.
Kimura came up with the name Powehi, which translates into “adorned fathomless dark creation.” In a proclamation, Gov. David Ige is declaring today “Powehi Day“ in Hawaii.
