Thursday 5 January 2017

schwarzschild radius

Sometime early this year, lensing the entire Earth as the aperture for the telescopic array and enlisting the help of dozens of observatories, a project called Event Horizon will peer across twenty-five thousand light years into the centre of the Milky Way to catch a glimpse of the super massive black hole—Sagittarius A*, or at least it the gas and dust heated to millions of degrees falling into it.
Since famously and captivatingly not even light can escape the singularity, only indirect observation is possible and researchers are reaching across time and space to find something invisible and containing the mass of a billion stars but compacted into an area much less than an astronomical unit—that is, the Earth’s distance from the Sun. These run-away reactive structures are thought to anchor all sizable galaxies and the experiment has an extensive list of stated objectives, including verifying General Relativity but perhaps first demonstrating that black holes are not some scientific figment.