Scientists want black hole videos after historic 2nd photo - Space.com

What does the Event Horizon Telescope have in store for us over the next few years.

Fresh off revealing its first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Event Horizon Telescope is ready to take its next steps by capturing movies of gas flowing turbulently onto a black hole.

The two black hole images the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has produced so far — that of Sagittarius A* in the Milky Way and that of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 — are snapshots in time.

Black holes are constantly churning as gas orbits around it surface, or event horizon, but still images don't really show this churn. .

Sagittarius A* in pictures: The 1st photo of the Milky Way's monster black hole explained in images.

Milky Way vs M87: Event Horizon Telescope photos show 2 very different monster black holes .

The first movie star will be the black hole in M87, an elliptical galaxy at the heart of the Virgo galaxy cluster, 54.5 million light-years away from Earth.

The gas ring imaged around Sagittarius A* could fit inside the orbit of Mercury, the radius of which is about 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) while the black hole in M87 could easily encompass the orbits of all the planets in the solar system.

Because Sagittarius A* is much smaller, changes occur much more quickly as gas whips around the black hole — too quickly for sporadic observing by the EHT to track.

"Our next step will be to make polarized images of Sagittarius A*, so that we can see the magnetic fields near the black hole and see how they're dragged [around] by the black hole itself," Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said during the NSF news conference.

Seven observatories collaborated to image M87's black hole; with the addition of the South Pole Telescope, eight observatories took part in imaging Sagittarius A*. .

The Event Horizon Telescope operates through Very Long Baseline Interferometry, a technique that pairs off telescopes.

This factor is on display in the image of Sagittarius A*, which appears spotty: Those bright spots are not hot spots, but rather mark regions where viewing angles of more of the telescope pairs coincided, resulting in a stronger signal?

"One of the challenges is that there's not really any black holes that have a large enough event horizon, as projected on the sky, that can be easily imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope," Hickox said.

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— Black hole photos could get even clearer with space-based telescopes .