![]() ![]() So the black hole and the event horizon are illuminated by this three dimensional flashlight that lights up the space time, and one of the characteristics of the event horizon is that the light gets bent by gravity and so you wind up with a shadow feature. ![]() So it's a little bit like trying to suck an elephant through a straw it's very hard to do and, when you ultimately do it, it's a big mess. Everything is rubbing up against each each and, just as your hands get warm when you rub them together, all this gas and dust heats up to billions of degrees. You can think of it this way: the black hole is insanely powerful and it's trying to attract all of this gas, dust, and ionised plasma into a very small volume and you get a cosmic traffic jam. Shep - Well, in a paradox of their own immense gravity, black holes, which by definition are dark are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. How would you be able to study something like that? Georgia - Past the event horizon, by its very nature, you can't really see into it. Shep - There's a part of the Universe that is forever separate from our experience, and that's inside inside the event horizon, and the size and the shape of that event horizon is predicted by Einstein's equations which have withstood all the tests that we've subjected them to in the solar system and the larger universe, and now we'd like to go to the one place where they might break down, at the event horizon itself. Shep Doelman is an astronomer at the MIT Haystack Observatory and Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and he's part of an initiative called The Event Horizon Telescope project, which aims to get the first image of the shadow cast by the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, as he explains to Georgia Mills. ![]() But there might be a way to do it by looking at the shadow cast by the event horizon and using this to infer what made that shadow. This means it's proved impossible for astronomers to physically see what's going on beyond this point. The event horizon at the mouth of a black hole is the point of no return: once light crosses this threshold, there is no going back. ![]()
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