The astronomers who captured the first-ever image of a black hole have revealed plans to capture footage of one of the monsters feeding on anything unlucky enough to be nearby.
A projected called the Event Horizon Telescope have just won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, meaning they were handed $3 million for their work to snap images of a supermassive hole at the centre of a galaxy M87.
The team hope to follow up their historic achievement by capturing moving images of a hole swallowing up material.
‘What I predict is that by the end of the next decade we will be making high quality real-time movies of black holes that reveal not just how they look, but how they act on the cosmic stage,” Shep Doeleman, the project’s director, told AFP.
“It could be that maybe we will make the first crude movie [by 2020],’ he added.
The Event Horizon Telescope team used a vast array of telescopes all across the planet that were synchronized to work together.
Their image was revealed at a press conference in Brussels beamed around the world. It shows the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy and its shadow.
The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun.
The black hole’s boundary — the ‘event horizon’ from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.
The M87 galaxy is one of the biggest and brightest in the known universe and is 53.49 million light years away from Earth.
It is notable for shooting out a fast jet of charged subatomic particles that stretches for some 5,000 light years, which makes it the perfect target for the EHT project.