Science Astronomers are capturing video of a black hole for the first time

Contrary to science fiction, black holes are not portals to other dimensions or cosmic vacuum cleaners that swallow up everything around them.

“The media always paints black holes as these pits of despair, and everything falls in, but they're much more fun than that,” astrophysicist Sera Markoff told Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald.

Markoff is part of a global team working to capture the first-ever video of a black hole, a scientific leap that could reveal how these mysterious cosmic objects behave.

“There's just an enormous amount of questions that we'd like to be able to answer about black holes,” she said.

In 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole — a supermassive one at the heart of Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, about 50 million light-years from Earth — using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio telescopes that operates as a single virtual instrument, linking facilities from Antarctica to Spain and Chile.

Markoff, the Plumian professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge, says the EHT is now being used to track the colossal black hole in M87 in motion — an advance that could reveal details that still images cannot. There are now 12 telescopes in total, but only eleven will take part, as the telescope in the South Pole cannot see M87.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/black-hole-video-astronomy-space-science-9.7117478

Stuff I only dreamed of in my youtn.