Liao Junzhi, president of the Academia Sinica, said, “The press conference once again witnessed that Taiwan continues to occupy a place in the world’s most important scientific discoveries.”
In 2019, the “Event Horizon Telescope” project participated by the Academia Sinica released the first M87 image in history.
Bu Hongyi, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at National Taiwan Normal University, said, “This time we want to see this image, we have overcome some methods, so it is more like the result of long exposure, we can still see the center of the Milky Way, the general appearance of the black hole image. ”
Overcome the obstacles of dust and plasma drifting between the Milky Way, and challenge the impossible mission again after 3 years. The Event Horizon Telescope, which brings together 8 radio telescopes around the world, has photographed the huge black hole “Sagittarius A” at the center of the Milky Way where the Earth is located. This black hole is 26,000 light-years away from the Earth, but its mass is only 4 million suns.
Guo Junyi, a Ph.D. from the Institute of Astronomy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “Everyone knows that the gravity of black holes is very strong, and nothing can escape even light, so we cannot see the black hole itself, but what we can see is the gas emitted by the surrounding gas around the black hole. The light of the black hole is refracted towards us by strong gravity, so that it can be observed by us, and the actual size of the black hole shadow depends on the mass of the black hole itself.”
Compared with the M87 galaxy photographed in 2017, the mass of Sagittarius A is much smaller than that of the black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy, but it is 2,000 times closer to the earth than the black hole of the M87 galaxy, but the black hole presented is similar to the shape of a doughnut. , so it can be confirmed that “ring” is a feature of black holes.
Liao Junzhi, dean of the Academia Sinica, said, “Although both look like doughnuts, in the process of imaging these two black holes, we have learned the verification of the theory, which is a very big contribution to science.”
Academia Sinica also stated that the Event Horizon Telescope will expand and add more virtual telescopes and increase the visible frequency of radio telescopes. In the future, there will be opportunities to see higher-resolution images of the M87 galaxy and the black hole of Sagittarius A star.
(FTV News/Reported by Huang Zhilin and Cai Chengyou in Taipei)