Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole

Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."

Comments

rest of sentence

[uberjoe]

And were never seen again.

And yet...

[Hertne]

the article makes absolutely no mention of glaciers melting in the dead of night.

Re:Scully Using a Very Large Scapel for Dissection

[HTH NE1]

The question is where they'd get a large enough scalpel to dissect a supermassive black hole?

And yet sharp enough to dissect a singularity.