Sheshan radio telescope helps acquire first image of Galactic center black hole
Print Edition
A radio telescope in Sheshan Town of Songjiang District has assisted scientists in acquiring the first image of the Galactic center black hole.
A scientific breakthrough about the Galactic core was achieved at 9pm, May 12, in that the image of the supermassive black hole, the Sgr A*, was issued for the first time.
Scientists compared the difficulty of the achievement to “using a telescope on Earth to observe a punctuation mark on a newspaper on the moon” as the Galactic center black hole is about 27,000 light years away from the Earth.
“It’s a global cooperation project. We started it five years ago back in 2017,” said Jiang Wu, associate researcher of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory. “Relying on VLBI (very long baseline interferometry) technology, we connected several radio telescopes at different locations on Earth to achieve an observatory strength equal to that from a super telescope. The Tianma Telescope in Sheshan Town, as an important station of the VLBI’s East Asia network, has been providing high-quality data for global astronomers for a long time.”
From March to May 2017, the Tianma Telescope participated in 8 EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) cooperative observations of the Galactic core and 14 EHT cooperative observations of the M87 galaxy central black hole.
“The Tianma Telescope has an advantage in observing long millimeter wave, which helped our subsequent data adjustment,” noted Jiang.
“It took scientists five years to obtain an image of Sgr A*, which is a forever rapidly changing black hole. The image is still blurred as the EHT’s capturing capability still needs improving.”
Currently, China is planning to build more submillimeter wave telescopes, as the facilities can improve the EHT’s capturing capability.
“We are now constructing a 5-meter millimeter wave telescope near the Tianma Telescope to do tests and try to pave the way for submillimeter wave telescope construction in our country,” Jiang revealed.
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