Movies of Black Holes are on the (Event) Horizon

Today marks the last day of meetings for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration in Berlin, Germany. The collaborative effort shared on X (formerly Twitter) last week that a meeting would be held in Berlin from July 14-18. “120 international scientists will gather to discuss the next big goals for black hole science – publishing new, better images using recent data and creating “movies” of M87*,” EHT shared on X.

The Event Horizon Telescope Array is a virtual Earth-sized telescope made using the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) method. This method allows the ~11 participating observatories to observe an object in short wavelengths at the same time, then use their offset on Earth when correlating the data to create a more detailed image.

One of the big future goals of the EHT is to produce “movies” or moving images of M87*, the black hole in M87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy. EHT scientists have already observed M87* in 2017 and 2018 resulting in seeing a 30º shift in the “bright” part of the black hole ring. This shift is expected and demonstrates the turbulent nature of the material around the black hole.

“Even for M87* we can observe over days and actually make a beautiful video of how matter is falling into the black hole,” MIT Haystack and EHT research scientist Kazunori Akiyama said in and interview with Space Explored in 2023. He added that this video will also show and begin to explain how matter might escape the black hole, a phenomenon with little understanding.

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“That is kind of a necessary question to address, ‘where we are coming from.'” Akiyama explained in the interview how the matter and gas leaving a black hole can influence the evolution of the galaxy it is in and eject that gas beyond the limits of the galaxy, into intergalactic space.

The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has already released many images over the past eight years, revealing more details of both M87* and Sagittarius A* (the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy). One such recent image released in March 2024 shows Sagittarius A* in polarized light detailing the magnetic field structure around the black hole.

The magnetic field structure is “strikingly similar to that of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, suggesting that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes,” said the EHT Collaboration press release.

A future consisting of moving images of black holes is closely approaching. The “movies” will help astronomers understand black holes and their interactions with the galaxies they call home.