In April 2019, members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration were due to show the first images of what a black hole would look like, in this case the one at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, and the one at the heart of the M87 galaxy. Only the image of black hole M87* was eventually presented because that of our galaxy’s supermassive black hole had proved more difficult to obtain. But even that of M87* was surprisingly similar to the one that Jean-Pierre Luminet was the first to calculate realistically on the computer in the late 1970s and that about ten years later by his astrophysicist colleague Jean-Pierre Luminet Alain Marck, who unfortunately died much too young.
Unfortunately, Stephen Hawking and John Wheeler were no longer there to attend the event with us, but some of the other pioneers of black hole physics were present, such as Nobel Prize winners in physics, Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose.
A presentation of the success of the Event Horizon Telescope, as collaboration with it revealed on April 10, 2019 the first image of a black hole, the supermassive one at the heart of elliptical galaxy M87, some 53 million light-years from the Milky Way. For a fairly accurate French translation, click the white rectangle at the bottom right. Then the English subtitles should appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose French. © Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Jean-Pierre Luminet, in the blog made available to him by Futura, had explained in detail, in French and English, the origin and properties of the images of black holes surrounded by a hot plasma accretion disk that one could expect to see. He also traced the history of relativistic astrophysics on the subject.
- Interstellar: a black hole in Hollywood (1)
- “45 Years of Black Hole Imaging (1): Early Work 1972-1988”
But now, in a joint press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), it has just been announced that an online conference will be held in France on May 12, 2022 at precisely 3:00 p.m. to report new results right across the Milky Way!
The event will be global.
The talk will be streamed online on the ESO website and ESO YouTube channel. Simultaneously, press conferences will be held worldwide, including in Washington DC, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Tokyo and Taipei.