When the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) unveiled it in 2019, “I cried,” he said. In fact, Strominger’s U-turn toward these rings happened because of a photograph: the first-ever image of a black hole. Part of the excitement about the photon ring is that, unlike the event horizon, it’s actually visible. “It’s a target for a holographic description,” said Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the original architects of holography. But at the very least, theorists say the new paper has detailed a precise test for any quantum system claiming to be the black hole’s holographic dual. Much more theoretical study is needed before researchers can say for sure whether, or in what way, the photon ring encodes a black hole’s inner contents. “The new symmetry organizes the structure of black holes far from the event horizon, and I think that’s very exciting.” “It opens up a very interesting avenue for understanding the holography of these geometries,” said Alex Maloney, a theorist at McGill University in Canada who was not involved in the research. The discovery has led researchers to debate whether the photon ring might even be part of a black hole’s “holographic dual” - a quantum system that’s exactly equivalent to the black hole itself, and which the black hole can be thought of as emerging out of like a hologram. “This symmetry smells like something to do with the central problem of understanding the quantum dynamics of black holes,” he said. The symmetry suggests that the ring may encode information about the hole’s quantum structure.
In a paper posted online in May and recently accepted for publication in Classical Quantum Gravity, Strominger and his collaborators revealed that the photon ring around a spinning black hole has an unexpected kind of symmetry - a way that it can be transformed and still stay the same. “We’re exploring, excitedly, the possibility that the photon ring is the thing that you have to understand to unlock the secrets of Kerr black holes,” he said, referring to the kind of spinning black holes created when stars die and gravitationally collapse. Now Strominger is making his own U-turn and trying to convince other theorists to join him.
“And I thought of the photon ring as some sort of technical, complicated thing which didn’t have any deep significance.” “I had taken the view that the event horizon was what we needed to understand,” said Andrew Strominger, a leading black hole and quantum gravity theorist at Harvard University. Quantum gravity theorists seeking a truer, quantum description of gravity have therefore looked to the horizon for answers. But space-time warps so much inside black holes that general relativity breaks down there. Throughout most of the cosmos, gravity tracks with curves in space and time as described by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It makes sense that researchers have been preoccupied with the event horizon, since it marks the edge of their knowledge about the universe. If you detect the photons, “you’re going to see every object in the universe infinitely many times,” said Sam Gralla, a physicist at the University of Arizona.īut unlike the iconic event horizon of a black hole - the boundary within which gravity is so strong that nothing can escape - the photon ring, which orbits the hole farther away, has never received much attention from theorists.
#A black hole movie#
Some of these photons keep circling the black hole practically forever.ĭescribed by astrophysicists as a “cosmic movie camera” and an “infinite light trap,” the resulting ring of orbiting photons is among the weirdest phenomena in nature.
#A black hole series#
A rare few, however, skirt the hole, making a series of abrupt U-turns. When photons hurtle toward a black hole, most are sucked into its depths, never to return, or gently deflected away.
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