Photos of Black Holes Will Blow Our Minds Again in 2020
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration presented the first ever close-up image of a black hole.
For Bloomberg Opinion, Faye Flam reports that the telescope array will yield a second black hole image in 2020:
“In 2020, we will get an image of the supermassive black hole known to be lurking at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. ...
Scott Tremaine, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, says he’s excited to see the image of our galaxy’s own black hole, called Sagittarius A*, because other kinds of observations have hinted that it’s spinning with a certain orientation. Will the image bear this out? He’s interested in whether the mass calculated from the image matches the mass estimated with other methods. And there’s always the hope that the shadow won’t be a perfect sphere as predicted, but some anomalous shape requiring new ideas to explain.”
Read more at Bloomberg Opinion.
Scott Tremaine, currently Richard Black Professor in the IAS School of Natural Sciences, spoke on Sagittarius A* during a May 2019 public lecture at the Institute titled "Inward Bound: Discovering and Exploring the Milky Way's Black Hole."
Watch Tremaine explore what we know, what we hope to learn, and the techniques being used to study this exotic object, on the IAS YouTube channel.
