A black hole turned into a pop icon

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"It seemed impossible to achieve." It is the most repeated phrase among scientists when asked about the first image of a black hole, published on April 10 in the midst of enormous expectation. An astronomical achievement that has been chosen this Thursday by the science milestone Science magazine of 2019.

A choice that has not surprised because the diffused image, which many compared with a donut for its shape, showed the silhouette of the monstrous black hole in the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy , located 55 million light years from the earth.

It was obtained thanks to the work of a consortium of 200 scientists and engineers from about twenty countries, including Spain, who worked together to make sense and make images the large amount of data obtained during observations with the Horizon Telescope of Events (EHT) for Event Horizon Telescope. It is, in fact, a network of eight telescopes distributed all over the world that in very specific periods work together for this project with a technique called very long-based interferometry.

Just eight months after its publication, this supermassive black hole is on its way to becoming a pop icon. And it is that the image of the cosmic monster and its shadow is already part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). He gave it recently to the curators of the famous New York art center Peter Galison, a Harvard University researcher and member of the EHT consortium.

" For us it is an honor that MoMA has acquired the image of M8 7," admits Peter Galison, a researcher at Harvard University, who does not yet know when it will be exhibited : "There are even works by Picasso in the collection of the Museum that have not yet been exhibited. What I know is that the museum's curators were delighted to have the image of the black hole in their collection, ”he points out to this newspaper through an email.

The high quality printing they delivered to the museum was made by their own son , Sam Galison, who is an artist and designer in San Francisco.

As José Luis Gómez, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA) and one of the Spanish scientists who has played an important role in obtaining this image, recalls, the black hole of the M87 galaxy thus adds other iconic converted scientific snapshots in pop icons, like Earthrise [ Seen for the First Time By Human Eye s]. It was taken by astronaut William Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 from the Apollo 8 ship when it was very close to the Moon.

«From the collaboration of the EHT we are delighted with this recognition of the journal Science , which adds to others already received, and once again highlights the enormous scientific and social impact that has resulted in obtaining the first image of a black hole, something that until recently seemed impossible, ”says José Luis Gómez through an email.

«With this first image the black holes have left the ground of science fiction to become real objects that we can study with better precision, and thus perhaps obtain the answers that allow us to combine the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics, ”he says.

The black hole of our galaxy

What will be the following? The efforts of the EHT consortium, explains Gomez, are now focused on getting the first image of the black hole in the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A *. “We have very good previous estimates of the mass and distance of our neighboring black hole, so we hope to be able to test Einstein's theory of relativity with even better accuracy than that obtained for the black hole in the center of the Galaxy M87 », details.

However, the main difficulty is that Sagittarius A * is about 1,500 times smaller than the black hole of M8 7, "which makes it much more difficult to observe since its image can change in just a few minutes." To deal with this obstacle, they are developing new algorithms that allow them to capture this variability, "and thus obtain perhaps the first film of a black hole," Gómez says.

And if the image of the black hole in M87 is already a cultural icon, says the Spanish scientist, they expect "that the film of Sagittarius A * also captures the interest of scientists and the general public."

The goal is to publish the results of Sagittarius A * in 2020: «I hope they come with that first film. We are now trying to improve the Event Horizon Telescope so that in the next decade we will have black hole movies that do not have much to envy to those in Hollywood.

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