Heino Falcke “Light in the Dark”: The black hole and God behind it?

Radio astronomer Heino Falcke has written a captivating book on creating the first photo of a black hole.

It was a worldwide sensation when, on 10 April 2019 at 3:07 pm Central European Time, scientists in Brussels, Santiago de Chile, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo and Washington simultaneously recorded the first recording of one Black hole shown. Dear reader, of course you are right: it was not a picture of a black hole – there can be no such thing – but of the surroundings of a black hole. In the photo you can see a red ring of light in the background of a black space, in which a yellow path is seen. This light ring encloses a round black surface. Scientists call this the “shadow” of the black hole. The whole is the photo of M87 *. This is the name of this black hole in the galaxy Messier 87. The photo turned a hundred-year-old theory into an object. The ring of light has a diameter of 100 billion kilometers. It is 55 million light years – 500 trillion kilometers – from us.

Heino Falcke, Born in 1966 in Cologne, professor in Nijmegen, is one of the scientists who made these photos possible. Together with the journalist “Spiegel” Jörg Römer he wrote the book “Light in the dark: black holes, the universe and usIn it he describes how these photos were made possible. He talks about the scientific endeavors and talks about the logistical, political and even economic problems that had to be overcome in order to take these photos.

Black holes are space cemeteries

In the beginning, however, there is this awareness: “Supermassive black holes are space cemeteries. They come from blazing, burnt and dying stars. But space also feeds them with gigantic gas nebulae, planets and stars. Due to their absolute mass, they curve empty space to the extreme and appear to be able to stop the passage of time themselves. Black holes never release what comes too close to them, not even rays of light can escape them. “

The black hole that can be seen in the photo is said to have compressed 6.5 billion solar masses. One solar mass is approximately 333,000 Earth masses. The earth weighs nearly six trillion tons. A quintillion is a 1 with 21 zeros. One ton weighs 1000 kilograms. I’ve worked up to this point that I can see what “super massive” means. The truth, of course, is that I don’t realize anything. It’s just too much. But don’t let the numbers scare you. Spelling helps: 1021. That’s a trillion.

A perspective image of eight telescope systems

Eight radio telescopic stations – “ALMA” in Chile alone has 66 precision antennas – had to work together to photograph the M87 *. The entire global network of millimeter-wave radio telescopes, whose interaction made the first image of a black hole possible, is called the “Event Horizon Telescope”. 200 scientists from 60 institutes in twenty countries were involved in the work. For ten days in April 2017, the galaxy Messier 87 was under permanent observation from the perspective of the eight telescope systems. All coordinated with atomic clocks. Then came the work of creating an image from a large amount of data. A lot? Obviously that’s not how Heino Falcke speaks. It says: “32 gigabits per second, or 32 billion zeros and ones per second.” This is mainly sky noise and receiver noise. And then a very small noise from the edge of the black hole. Very little? The total energy of the black hole noise, perceived by our telescopes, “corresponds to the energy of a fragment of hair that is one millimeter long and falls from a height of one millimeter into the void onto a glass plate.”

In the process of creating images from this data, there is now competition alongside cooperation. Each group has to develop images for themselves. This is the only way to determine if you’ve really come up with similar results independently of each other. “Our data did not come from the wave range visible to the eye. What color is such a light? We had calculated the brightness, but no color. Basically, we could have used a contour map or a grayscale image. This too would have shown the data significantly, but it would be boring to look at ”. At the end there are “images of four different days with three different algorithms each, so twelve images. They all look the same, but they are not exactly the same…. Eventually, the group decides to simply average the three different methods for the best measurement day in April 2017 into one image. The images of the other days and the single images are also shown, but not so clearly “.

Heino Falcke gives an idea of ​​how far our observations are today from the world in which – if one follows the Brechtian idea – a Galileo might say to the timid opponents of his theory: “I thought you would just look through the telescope and convince yourself? “Florentine scholars prefer to discuss with Brecht rather than look through the telescope. When Galileo asks once again to look through the telescope to see how things really are, the mathematician replies: “One might be tempted to answer that your tube, showing something that cannot be, is not. It should be a very long tube. reliable, isn’t it? “Modern imaging techniques show us how much common sense there would have been in the mathematician’s objection if he had only cared about understanding the tools of our perception as active factors.

Heino Falcke explains what we don’t see

In the photo that went around the world in April last year, there is so much human work, so much artificial intelligence, it has such a long history that it has involved so many different sciences – it is impossible for us to decide what we should think about it. . It is very clear that there is also the “show”: you could have “used an image with shades of gray. This too would have shown the data in a meaningful way, but it would have been boring to look at ”.

This is what Heino Falcke writes. It is good that you write it. It tells us that what we see is not just what we think we see. Furthermore, anyone who reads “Light in the Dark” carefully understands that our brains also use imaging processes. Our head is not a cinema where films are shown. Inside there is a computer that transforms the signals into images, sounds and smells. What we consider our sensory impressions are already translations that our brain does for us.

Stephen Hawking has been confirmed

Coined in 1988 Stephen Hawking in his book “A brief history of time“The concept of spaghetti. Since the attraction of a black hole increases with decreasing distance, stronger forces act on the side of the object facing the black hole than on the opposite side. This will stretch the object and tear it apart. This was how Hawking imagined it. On 12 October 2020, a team of astronomers, using the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (Eso), captured the final moments of a star that was torn apart by a supermassive black hole. Exactly how Hawking had developed it. Once again the photos have gone around the world.

We lay people always and only see that the theses are confirmed. We don’t notice how many views and models fail. Heino Falcke’s book also shows us how much strength, curiosity and enthusiasm it takes to cling to a great research project through all the mistakes. The second chapter of the book ends with the following sentences: “I proudly announced in a press release:” Soon we will be able to see the black hole! “- Actually it should take another 20 years”.

You cannot go beyond God

You must be very convinced of what you are doing. You must believe it. Which brings us to something that worried me the longest I’ve read in the book: Heino Falcke’s faith. In the final chapter “Omnipotence and limits” he writes: “Atheism is a legitimate belief, it cannot be scientifically justified. Refuting God with the help of science seems to me just as absurd as trying to prove God with the help of science. Not only do black holes show us that borders are part of our world. Who dares to ask beyond the limits of physics, cannot go beyond God … I think that a completely Godless physics is not possible if you really ask the limits of human knowledge … God is more necessary today than ever. “

Now you understand what drives this man. As a child, he writes, he would lie in bed and imagine what was behind the sky, behind and behind. Was there infinity or God? Or was that it? Today he is 54 years old, he has not stopped asking these questions, he is close as few in front of the black hole and in the Protestant church of Frechen and he holds services there as a preacher. I wanted to ask him too.

As they say in Bob Dylan’s 1973 song, when little Heino Falcke lay in bed and wondered about the sky behind the sky? “It’s getting dark, too dark to see / I hear I’m knocking on heaven’s door.”