Infinite Visions Were Hiding in the First Black Hole Image’s Rings

Out There Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable. A year ago a team of radio astronomers startled the world with the first photograph of a black hole, lurking like the eye of Sauron in the heart of a distant galaxy. Now it appears there was more hiding in that image than we had imagined. When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don’t just see the swirling sizzling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in.

You can also see the whole universe. Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope. “The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings,” said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not unlike the rings that form around your bathtub drain. Dr.

Johnson was lead author of a study, describing the proposed method that would allow our telescopes to pry more secrets from the maw of any black hole, that was published in the March 18 edition of the journal Science Advances. He and other authors of the paper are also members of the team operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a globe-girding network of radio telescopes that made that first image of a black hole. Their telescope saw these rings, but it didn’t have enough resolution to distinguish them, so they were blurred into a single feature. The work, scientists with the project said, pointed toward new ways to shed light, so to speak, on the properties of black holes, particularly by adding a radio telescope in space to the existing E.

H. T. network. “This paper is, in my professional capacity, very cool!

” Shep Doeleman, also of Harvard-Smithsonian and leader of the E. H. T. collaboration, said in an email.

Andrew Strominger, a Harvard theorist and co-author of the paper, said, “Understanding the intricate details of this historic experimental observation has forced theorists like myself to think about black holes in a new way. ” Black holes are potholes in eternity, so massive that they swallow even light. They were an unwelcome prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. It describes gravity as the warping of space-time by mass and energy.