A little more than a year ago, Humanity got its first good look at the most mysterious at-budget of the vast universe.
For the first time, astronomers imagined a black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier (87) hidden about 53 million light-years away on the dark side of the universe.
The iconic image has fed scientists valuable data not only about these particularly large objects, but about black holes throughout the cosmos.
Now, a team of astronomers using the same image could not only learn about a supermassive black hole, but would use its spatial distortion by testing the theory of gravity.
Their findings were detailed in a study published last week in Astrophysical Journal And introduces a new field of black hole research.
The image of the M87 *, which has been captured on black holes so far, was compiled using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which collected large amounts of data from radio antennas around the world on the M87 *. The resulting picture reveals a crescent of hot gas and debris orbiting the horizon of the debris phenomenon, the area of space around the black hole, from which nothing can escape.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the g87 galaxy is 5.5 billion times larger than the Sun.
The hot gas circulating around the black hole appears as a glowing ring, while the black dot through the black hole is a dark shadow, as it receives any light that comes close to it. Using black hole shadow analysis, the team behind the new study was able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In 1915, the famous physicist theorized that massive objects accelerate the space and time around them. The gravitational force of a large black hole bends the time of space, and acts as a magnifying glass through which the shadow of a black hole appears larger than it is.
Researchers behind the new study measured the distortion of this vision to test Einstein’s theory, and found that it investigates.
“This is really the beginning,” Leah Madiros, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “We have now shown that it is possible to use the image of a black hole to test the theory of gravity.”
This is the first time that a gravity test has been carried out on the edge of a black hole, and shows that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is true even in extreme conditions around a black hole.
“This test will become even more powerful once we have a picture of a black hole in the center of our own galaxy and with additional telescopes in future EHT observations that are being added to the array.”
Not only does the recent study provide a new way to test the theory of gravity, it also helps the nature and evolution of black holes to allow scientists to connect data collected from images of black holes with data collected through further gravity experiments.
Abstract: The 2017 event of the central source in the M87 led to the first measurement of the size of a black-hole shadow due to Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations. This observation provides a new and clean gravity test of black-hole metrics in strong field regimes. We analytically show that due to space time deviating from the carrier metric but satisfying weak-field tests, large deviations can occur in predicted black-hole shadows, which is also inconsistent with current EHT criteria. We use numerical calculations of regular, parametric, or non-care metrics to identify the general characteristics of these different parametrizations controlling the size of the predictive shadow. We show that shadow-size measurement deviations place significant constraints on parameters that control the order of the second and each metric after Newtonian and, therefore, inaccessible to weak-field tests. The new barrier is a complement imposed by observations of gravitational waves from stellar-mass sources.
