On Thursday, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released images of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*. It is a direct detection of one of the most elusive types of astronomical objects and the culmination of more than a century of theoretical and experimental astronomical studies. The results are also a brilliant demonstration of the possibilities generated by human labor coordinated on an international and scientific basis.
More than 300 astronomers and hundreds of engineers and support staff from 60 institutions in 20 countries and regions on all seven continents have made the observations, processed the data and maintained the technical infrastructure necessary for such an immense undertaking. After Sgr A*’s observations were made in 2017, thousands of terabytes of data were transported to the MIT Haystack Observatory and the Max Planck Institute of Study to be processed and analyzed on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. It took five years of work to characterize and understand the results.
The immediate result is the product of more than two decades of planning through the collaboration, launched in 2009 with the primary goal of observing the two largest black holes in the sky as seen from Earth, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) and the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87. To do this, the collaboration involved radio telescopes from around the world and combined their observation capabilities to view astronomical objects never before seen directly.
The telescopes involved in capturing the data needed to produce the final image include the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment in Chile, the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona, the IRAM 30m Telescope in Spain, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, the Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico and the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica.
The image produced is also a resounding blow to all forms of irrational thinking, be it the mystique of religious obscurantism or postmodernism and the claim that all “stories” are equally valid. There is in fact an objective, material reality, which is governed by physical, knowable laws.
More in-depth results are expected to follow in the coming months and years. EHT completed its latest observation campaign in March, which includes three new telescopes that will provide even better images. And now that data has been collected and released on the two main goals of the collaboration, it will explore other, even more esoteric regions of the Universe, especially the galactic-scale energetic jets produced by supermassive black holes while holding large amounts of gas and dust in them. flow. †
As with any scientific discovery, the EHT array itself is the product of more than a century of pioneering work in theoretical astrophysics and advanced engineering. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, on which the modern understanding of black holes is based, was developed in 1915. The first detection of radio waves from the galactic core occurred in the 1930s, and the astronomical techniques needed to detect matter engulfed in a black hole spirals, were developed in the 1960s. It was not until the 1980s that Sgr A* was first believed to be a black hole, and observations in the 1990s and 2000s ruled out the vast majority of other possibilities.
At the same time, producing such images is an inherently international process. To achieve the resolution necessary to see the black hole (actually the extremely hot gas surrounding the invisible object), radio telescopes must be built and maintained on opposite sides of the globe, effectively turning the Earth into a giant radio antenna capable of detecting extremely weak signals.
Such large scientific ventures are becoming increasingly routine. The Large Hadron Collider, gravitational wave detection, the IceCube experiment to detect neutrinos, as well as virtually any space mission, require an international effort to succeed. A negative example: The European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, which was scheduled to launch this year, will now not launch until at least 2028 after Russia withdrew its participation in the mission due to sanctions imposed on the country after it was provoked by the US and NATO to war with Ukraine.
The need for international cooperation was noted by Xavier Barcons, the director-general of the European Southern Observatory, who said at a press conference to announce the findings: “This extraordinary result would not have been possible to achieve by a single facility or even the national astronomical community of a single country.It took eight radio observatories around the world, and that network has already expanded to eleven, many of which are built, funded, operated and supported by international organizations in many countries around the world world.”
Barcons then felt compelled to note that the discovery “shows what we can achieve when we work together, when we work together. This is very important to remember in the times we live in, where unfortunately the world doesn’t turn in that direction.”
Indeed not. One can assume that Barcons was referring to the escalating conflict between NATO and Russia, which threatens humanity with nuclear annihilation. Or perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed an estimated 20 million people worldwide and where rich countries have hoarded vaccines and other therapies.
Barcons could also have referred to the ongoing and accelerating climate catastrophe, which world governments have done nothing to mitigate and which threatens to drown the world’s shores by the end of the century. And despite warnings more than half a century of the impending disaster, nations have consistently refused to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the name of their national capitalist interests.
This state of affairs is a product of certain social and political relations and objective economic processes. It is the division of the world into rival nation states competing in a global capitalist market that causes such horrors, not to mention the crushing inequality and poverty that billions face every day.
Serious scientific collaboration implies a certain conscious effort on the part of those involved to reject the chauvinistic and nationalistic mantras spewed by every government, governments that would much rather see these scientists produce increasingly terrible weapons of mass destruction than work together to protect nature and our place within. to understand it.
Those same governments have overseen an astronomical redistribution of wealth during the pandemic, handing over trillions of dollars to Wall Street and other financial markets, while forcing workers back to work during a pandemic to pay for bailouts. The war in Ukraine has led to shortages of basic necessities, food and baby food, while inflation has skyrocketed, pushing an increasing proportion of the world’s population into poverty.
But towering scientific achievements such as the portrayal of Sagittarius A* give a glimpse of another base of social organization. If the principles of scientific planning and international cooperation that led to this triumph were applied to contemporary society, it would be possible to end war, poverty, preventable diseases and all other forms of social misery.
The capitalist class has proven that it is only committed to the continued accumulation of private profit, regardless of the consequences for the ecology of the earth or the cost in human lives. It is thus left to the working class, the objectively revolutionary and international social force in society, to overthrow capitalism as a whole and pave the way for a new and higher social order, socialism.
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