Azernews.Az

by Aliyeva Alimat

Astronomers from the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project plan to capture the first-ever video of a black hole this March and April. The target is a colossal space object the size of our Solar System, with a mass equivalent to six billion Suns, Azernews reports.

The EHT will focus on the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87, aiming to record video footage of the swirling accretion disk that marks the edge of the event horizon—the boundary beyond which neither light nor matter can escape.

The Event Horizon Telescope is not a single instrument but a global network of 12 radio telescopes, spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and South Korea. In 2019, this same collaboration made history by producing the first-ever image of a black hole’s shadow, a breakthrough that captured worldwide attention.

“We may be able to learn more about the rotation rate of a black hole and how these cosmic giants launch relativistic jets. Both are among the biggest mysteries in our field,” said Sera Markoff, professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Understanding the spin rate of a black hole could provide crucial insights into how such enormous objects grow and evolve, and potentially reveal new details about the extreme physics at the edge of space and time. Some scientists also hope the video might shed light on the mysterious mechanisms behind the jets that shoot out at nearly the speed of light, shaping their host galaxies in dramatic ways.

This upcoming video could also allow the public to “see” the dynamic nature of a black hole in motion for the very first time, offering a glimpse of one of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena in action.