There is No Photo of a Black Hole

From The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

(This article was first published in www.bhekuzulukhumalo.com on 7/20/2019)

There is no photo of a black hole, but there could be one with available data and technology. So why on April 10, 2019 was there so many headlines in big science news and small science news about a photo of a black hole. ¹Phys.org had the headline “Astronomers deliver first photo of black hole.” The author says, “The image of a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white-hot plasma looks like any number of artists' renderings over the last 30 years. But this time, it's the real deal.”

²Nature magazine had on it’s news site the headline, “Black hole pictured for first time — in spectacular detail,” and the sub headline “The Event Horizon Telescope’s global network of radio dishes has produced the first-ever direct image of a black hole and its event horizon.”

Scientific American had an impressive headline also, “At Last, a Black Hole’s Image Revealed”. In the article a director of the project ““We have taken the first picture of a black hole,” the EHT project’s director, Sheperd Doeleman, said in a news release. “This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.””. Not one of the 200 team members thought of challenging the idea is that really a photo of a black hole.

The Event Horizon collaboration team however had itself as one of its conclusions in the ⁴paper entitled “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole”

 “In conclusion, we have shown that direct studies of the event horizon shadow of supermassive black hole candidates are now possible via electromagnetic waves…” Why the event horizon if it is an image of a black hole.

We know that the temperatures of a black hole approach zero, but we have images of temperatures in the billions of kelvins. That alone tells us it is not a photo of a black hole, the temperatures they where reading. But at the least the black hole is confirmed.

To take a photo of a black hole we need to accept the temperature of a black hole and that all heat is about the electromagnetic spectrum. This was explained in the ⁵paper “What is Heat; The Photon is Heat.” A photo has to do with photons of any wavelength.

That we know the temperature of a black hole means we can take an actual photo of the black hole itself, not the event horizon. What we know about information is that it is rarely spread out uniformly. By carefully measuring these differences in temperature in terms of a black hole then we would have a photo of a black hole. This photo will immediately reveal many facts about a blackhole that remain hidden. These facts will allow us to study the black hole itself.

Mapping the temperature of a black hole not only will tell us about the temperature distribution of a black hole, but it will also inform us about the behaviour of gravity in regard to the black hole. Where it is hotter gravitational pull though immense will be less than gravitational pull of colder regions. One must always keep in mind that the hottest regions of a black hole are approaching zero degrees kelvin. The colder the region of a black hole the stronger the gravitational pull because less information is escaping in that region, heat is information.

Taking the photo of temperature of a black hole is a map, that allows us to see temperature distribution and gravitational distribution of a black hole. This will allow us to understand how magnetism is behaving around a black hole. A lot of information from taking a proper photo of a black hole, and that has to do with mapping out its temperature, no other information is escaping a black hole. A big deal, but not as big a deal as everything is in a relationship, the little we know about black holes is because of relationships we observe.

Bhekuzulu Khumalo

References:

1. phys.org (April 2019). Astronomers deliver first photo of black hole https://phys.org/news/2019-04-astronomers-unveil-photo-black-hole.html

2.Castelvecchi, Davide (April 2019). Black hole pictured for first time — in spectacular detail Nature Magazine https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01155-0

3. Billings, Lee (April 2019) At Last, a Black Hole’s Image Revealed Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-last-a-black-holes-image-revealed/

4. EHT (April 2019) First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole, The Astrophysical Journal Letters https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

5. Khumalo, Bhekuzulu (Jan 2019) What is Heat; The Photon is Heat, Journal of Advances in Physics https://cirworld.com/index.php/jap/article/view/8054

 

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