An artist's illustration of a black hole. (Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA/HO/REUTERS/FILE)
Black holes: a sharper view
By synchronizing radio telescopes, scientists move one step closer to proving their existence.
By Robert C. Cowen | Columnist for The Christian Science Monitor/ September 4, 2008 edition
Sometimes science is like a soccer match in which a demonstration of a more effective way to play the game is more important than the final score.
That’s the way it is with recent research that’s given us the sharpest view yet of the black hole some 25,000 light years away at the heart of our galaxy. It’s also like that with a new way of looking at fingerprints that not only reveals who owns the finger but also what chemicals the finger has poked into.
Sheperd Doeleman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have taken a tried and true radio astronomy technique to a new level in scrutinizing that black hole. It’s a kind of mathematical sleight of hand in which a bunch of small radio telescopes are linked and synchronized so that they act like one big instrument. Dr. Doeleman’s international research team linked four radio telescopes separated by thousand of miles to form a “virtual” instrument that acts like a single telescope 2,800 miles in diameter. The imaging power of a dish antenna that large is sharp enough to pick out “a baseball on the surface of the moon,” Doeleman says.
Actually, the observations the team reports Sept. 4 in Nature do not show the black hole directly. It’s gravity is so strong that not even light escapes if it’s inside the black hole’s so-called event horizon. This area marks the zone of no return for anything falling toward the black hole. The hole reveals itself by the radiation emitted by material falling toward or orbiting the event horizon.
By sharpening their view, the researchers were able to detect the highest density yet seen for the concentration of matter at our galaxy’s center. Doeleman calls this “important new evidence supporting the existence of black holes.”
In MIT’s announcement, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb, not a research team member, explains the observing technique’s importance. The fact that such observations are now feasible, he says, “opens up a new window for probing the structure of space and time near a black hole and testing Einstein’s theory of gravity,” which predicts black holes should exist.
At Purdue University, Demian R. Ifa and colleagues are opening a new window for viewing latent fingerprints. As any good “CSI” script will point out, latent fingerprints are just distributions of chemicals in distinctive patterns on specific surfaces. The Purdue researchers are developing a way to get important information from the nature of those chemicals in addition to what can be gleaned from looking at the fingerprint pattern itself.
They explained last month in Science how they obtain samples of the various fingerprint chemicals by an evaporation process. They weigh the samples to get the mass of each type of chemical molecule. They then can proceed to identify what chemicals are present in the print. Their early tests show they can easily detect traces of explosives or illegal drugs. With this kind of analysis, you can tell not only who left the fingerprint but what substances the suspect handled.
These simple examples illustrate an important point: Scientific progress depends heavily on how well your techniques allow you to play the research game.
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Comments
2. mikee | 09.06.08
“what is on the other side of a black hole?”
like asking what’s on the other side of earth. still earth. still a black hole.
“where does it take you?” take you? ??? it’s not an elevator.
4. Astrojazz | 09.08.08
Scienties around the world are attempting to recreate black holes for study.
Here is a story of one group of scientists right here in the US.
5. EMBRACEtheEND | 09.09.08
you can’t argue that it’s a “hole” just because it’s named that.
it’s just a superdense mass that crushes things into very very dense and small pieces that it adds to its mass.
and the height of human in relation to the strength of gravity of a black hole would rip the person to bits nanoseconds after entering the event horizon. gravity increases dramatically with each inch you get closer the black hole, so if you decided to “jump into” the event horizon, your toes would be ripped off. then you’d be disassembled the rest of the way down. so black hole “travel” doesn’t make sense, unless you’re looking for a one-ticket to the “after-life”
6. donna | 09.09.08
Why do scientists intervine in things where the outcome is unknown. who knows the conciquence should a fracture occure in the pipeline of the accelerator at full speed. If you were to power down this machine in the event of an emergency , would it respond imediately.
7. Vitaly | 09.10.08
According to some theoretical work. Black holes very well can lead to somewhere, because time and space are warped to such a great degree, rips in the fabric of space and time are not improbable. Also, black hole travel at least from a theoretical perspective is possible. You will just have to be going at the same speed as created by the black hole at and past the event horizon. You see there is more to this stuff than is mentioned on the Discovery Channel.
8. Jake | 09.11.08
Listen, i’ll comment on what Ant said. Do NOT volunteer. You’ll be stretched to death by the gravity.
9. John | 09.25.08
The word hole in blackhole leads many paople astray from what a blackhole actually is. a black hole is the core of a collapsed star. it creates a region of near infinite warping of space and time. things that go to close or cross what is called the event horizon of the black hole have absoltely no way of escape. chances are that you would probably be torn apart before you even got close to the black hole or the event horizon surrounding it, because through a process called, catch this “spaghettification” your body would be torn apart by massive tidal froces created in the vicinity of the blackhole. However, the intensity of these tidal forcesgets weaker as the mass of the blackhole goes up, so you could probably get pretty darn close to the blackhole before you meet a very exciting end. The black hole in the center of our galaxy is extremely massive so you see… By the way the scientific name for a blackhole is a singularity.
As to what VITALITY said a black hole can lead somewhere else if one was able to produce significant amounts of negative energy, and if you did have a transversible singularity no Jake you would not be torn apart because the blackhole would be rotating and charged so as to negate the tidal forces normally created. so is a blackhole transversible. in theory but ould you acctually get across alive. probably not as the radiation would kill.
God Bless You all.
Your friendly neihborhood 18 year old astrophysicist John
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1. daniel | 09.04.08
what is on the other side of a black hole?
OR where does it take you?