• Question: Are scientists creating something that will hopefully get past the event horizon of a black hole and we can get footage of what's past it

    Asked by The Roma to Chris, Kathryn, Sarah on 16 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      No, what they’re doing instead is trying to view the event horizon of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. No-one has ever seen the event horizon so that’s an achievement in itself.

      The event horizon is basically the boundary of a black hole, a do not cross line, but it isn’t actually anything physical. It the point after which something passes it, it can never escape from the black hole, and will continue falling towards the singularity. This is because at that point, the gravitational field of the black hole is so strong that nothing, not even light, can reach the escape velocity necessary to leave the black hole. Because of this, it’s impossible to get any information out of a black hole, so we will never know what’s beyond an event horizon. šŸ™

    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      Wow, I’d never heard about this research, it’s really amazing. So there’s a number of countries working together on an Earth-sized virtual telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope, which works by using lots of telescopes across the world at the same time. Sagittarius A and another black hole M87, are being studied because the appear to be the largest in the galaxy. They collected data just this April, and are trying to put together images right now! They are working to get even higher quality images, because this depends on weather, which telescopes they use and their location, as well as trying to reduce blurring of images as the light travels from the black hole toward the Earth

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