Hubble Directly Images Disc Around a Black Hole

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the HST site: "A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The incredible precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc's size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc."

Comments

1 up on Hubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I've imaged disks that have gone into a black hole before this.

Seriously though, this is great news for astronomers and astrophysicists of the future alike. It's always nice to see nice and complicated effects like this one directly.

It's just goatse

[Lunix Nutcase]

Don't get too excited it was just accidentally turned in the direction of goatse.

We've come a long way...

[msobkow]

We've come a long way since we first gazed at the stars and wondered...

Re:We've come a long way...

[Canazza]

As opposed to what we do now?

Re:We've come a long way...

[interkin3tic]

Now we don't just gaze. We rip that mother******* open with lasers!

Re:We've come a long way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still remembering astronomy classes when I was a kid where the very respected instructors would tell me we would never image a star as more than a point light source, and planets were out of the question. Quasars were simply unknown bright lights that nobody knew much of anything about.
(You've come a long way, baby...) Now get off my lawn.

Hubble Space Telescope

[ackthpt]

Blowing your mind since 1990

Best damn use of NASA funds, since the Moon landing.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[peragrin]

I would say the mars rovers were a better bang for the buck, but hubble is a close second even with all the retrofits.

I still find it a shame that the last shuttle mission wasn't a trip to the hubble to bring it home. just like the shuttle were designed to do.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[firex726]

Yea, lets just disregard all the scientific advances that have come from NASA.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[frosty_tsm]

I would say the mars rovers were a better bang for the buck, but hubble is a close second even with all the retrofits.

I still find it a shame that the last shuttle mission wasn't a trip to the hubble to bring it home. just like the shuttle were designed to do.

Other than for it to go into a museum, what would be the benefit of spending millions of dollars bringing 20-year-old technology back to earth (rather than letting it spend another 10 years in space)? Sure you can say stuff like "to see what the effects of 20 years in 0-gravity were" but we have other examples.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairly certain the shuttle's permissible landing weight is much lower than it's launch weight. Did they ever bring a satellite home?

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Khan Fused]

Yes, the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility), among other items.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Yvanhoe]

The scientific input of the rovers were close to zero. Yet during the same time a German team made a cartography of Mars underground resources, including large quantities of frozen water, yet no one talked about.

Rovers were a mere PR stunt.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[sortius_nod]

because no single NASA invention has ever helped the 3rd world. Not the water filters, emergency blankets, dehydrated foods, the list goes on.

Maybe you should learn before commenting like an arse.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Not officially

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[treeves]

Especially Tang. I hate Tang.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, maybe you should read the post before commenting. In particular:

Never mind it makes jobs and science byproducts that benefits everyday life.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Raenex]

I would say the mars rovers were a better bang for the buck

I would say the amount and variety of information we've obtained from Hubble absolutely dwarfs the limited exploration of the Mars rovers. The Deep Field picture alone is more interesting than anything the rovers did.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[niktemadur]

Good memory there, I first heard this drivel about HST twenty years ago, when it was launched with the original warped mirror and before the "contact lens" was installed. Yeah, some pundit on the teevee made the predictably pedantic comment, and the very next day my college roommate spit out the "ditto", as a "very earnest and personal opinion", LOL.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not leave the Hubble in space, and keep using it until it fails? Surely it's more valuable as an operating telescope than as a museum piece.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you're german.

The rovers have been putting out data for years. Off the top of my head I recall their up-close images of sedimentary rocks, the 'blueberry' pebbles (evidence for water), and the discoloured soil unearthed by the malfunctioning wheel.

But don't take my word for it, wiki has a whole freaking page dedicated to their scientific output.

And the german team that 'made a cartography' of u/g resources? I'm going to go out on a wild limb here and just assume that
- they used data gathered by an american satellite (the mars global surveyor, probably)
- they worked with people in nasa
- nasa also made maps like this

really, one of the first goals of NASA's mars program is finding water. I refuse to believe that some krauts using borrowed data beat them to that.

You want the world to acknowledge german achievements? Then acknowledge american achievements.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Jappus]

- they used data gathered by an american satellite (the mars global surveyor, probably)

Actually, they might easily have used the Mars Express probe that was made and launched by ESA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Express

Not every satellite orbiting this or other planets was made by the US. Of course, lacking the original sources squabbling about what they might or might not have used is pretty much the definition of pointless.

And by the way, why would working together with NASA be any problem for determining who did what science? Last I heard, most European, Russian, Japanese and American space research is shared and more or less coordinated. For example, both the data from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express are used by NASA, JAXA, ESA and RKA. Just because the image and other data was gathered by a probe from made in a different country, that doesn't mean that only one country analyses the research. And if you're the first to analyse a particular set of data and publish your findings, why shouldn't you get credit for just that? It's the difference between data and information. An image alone is mostly data, a research paper derived from it (ideally) mostly information.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Rich0]

The hubble is probably a lot heavier than a typical satellite, and I suspect you'd have to prep it so that it doesn't fall apart when subjected to stress, or damage the shuttle in the process.

Landing weight for any glider is obviously an issue (especially one already covered in ceramic tiles and carrying a pile of lifeless engines). Re-entry weight is another big issue, as well as center-of-gravity/etc. Every pound of mass on the shuttle is just that much more kinetic energy being converted to heat blasting against the heat shield.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of Hubble: $63 billion,
And the cost of JWST that is 1000x more powerful and being complained about being too expensive?
$18 billion.

I hate politicians. Where is some of that damn Obama money when it can actually be useful?

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[rocket rancher]

actually, maybe *you* need to learn not to feed the trolls.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Anonymous Coward]

Blowing your mind since 1990

Best damn use of NASA funds, since the Moon landing.

Apart from the monumental fuckup with the PRIMARY mirror that meant it was partially blind untill it had the 'operation' four years later.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Jason Levine]

I would say put it in a museum to inspire kids to study STEM. Then again, perhaps someone should make a roving Hubble exhibit. Make a life size, non-working replica of the Hubble telescope, select a couple dozen of the most spectacular photos and print them poster-sized. Then go from town to town showing off what Hubble did and promoting exploring space. I'm not sure how much it'd cost to create a look-alike of the exterior of the Hubble, but I'm guessing it would cost much less than the amount it'd cost to bring Hubble back to Earth safely.

Re:Hubble Space Telescope

[Yvanhoe]

Not everyone is a nationalistic fanboy you know. French here but this is less important in my opinion than me being a techy and a science fan. I feel closer to Americans or Chineses who share my interests than to my xenophobic neighbour.

Actually, I am not complaining about how good NASA's PR department is, I am more complaining about how real technological and scientific innovation are not what interest the public nowadays.

The German experiment I am talking about was a device in the ESA mission to Mars. It embarked a truly revolutionary spectrograph that helped map the underground composition of Mars down to a few meters deep. It is far more innovative than the rovers which used principles that were known in the 70s'.

Brilliant

[Bovius]

Using stars between us and the black hole as a lens to magnify the viewing target? That seems like the astronomer's equivalent of a ninja move. Brilliant.

We're sure getting a lot of use out of Hubble. Weren't we planning on decommissioning it at some point in time? I'm glad we didn't.

Re:Brilliant

[ackthpt]

Using stars between us and the black hole as a lens to magnify the viewing target? That seems like the astronomer's equivalent of a ninja move. Brilliant.

We're sure getting a lot of use out of Hubble. Weren't we planning on decommissioning it at some point in time? I'm glad we didn't.

This is why studying Math is such a great idea. It can lead to a Phascination with Physics (because Physics is Phun! =)

Re:Brilliant

[Tyrannosaur]

i thought that was friction F=un (I'm sorry, /. won't let me put a mu)

Re:Brilliant

[EngrBohn]

Alas, we have no way to conduct servicing missions to maintain HST. Sooner or later, it will have to be decommissioned.

Re:Brilliant

[Obfuscant]

No, no. It's the integral of e to the x power is a function of u to the n'th power.

Re:Brilliant

[Kjella]

Well, the effect has been known since 1979. It's just that everything lines up very rarely, it's amazingly effective when it works but you can't exactly move the lens so you only get to focus on what's exactly behind it. We are going to need bigger and better telescopes to solve the general case.

Albert Einstein, bad-ass

[93 Escort Wagon]

And to think he figured this stuff out around 100 years ago...

Re:Albert Einstein, bad-ass

[ackthpt]

And to think he figured this stuff out around 100 years ago...

About 8 years ago I was using the Deep Field View for my desktop wallpaper - there's a lot of gravitational lensing going on in there, if you look carefully. Ol' Albert was a pretty sharp one, a little sad he didn't live to see these sorts of images - I'm certain he'd be so stoked that he'd pump his fist and shout, "Yesssss!"

In the spirit of science I'll toast to his memory with a pint when I gets home tonight.

Re:Albert Einstein, bad-ass

[element-o.p.]

In the spirit of science I'll toast to his memory with a pint when I gets home tonight.

That's as good a reason as any, and better than most. I may have to do likewise ;)

Re:Albert Einstein, bad-ass

[Ihmhi]

About 8 years ago I was using the Deep Field View

My brain instantly parsed that as a potential goatse pun & link.

Hubble: White Elephant MY ASS!

[Chas]

Giving the finger to naysayers, budget cutters and luddite schmucks for 20+ years (and going). Not to mention some absolutely MIND-BLOWING interstellar photography.

Definitely not bad for a girl with glasses.

Re:Hubble: White Elephant MY ASS!

[treeves]

A girl? How does a telescope have a gender? If it did, shouldn't it be male, since its namesake Edwin Hubble, was male?

Re:Hubble: White Elephant MY ASS!

[Anonymous Coward]

but but but guverment taxes guverment guverment bad PRIVATE SECTOR BETTEr no goverment good at efficenet TAXES BAD argh argh hubble socialism guverment bad ANGRY

Re:Hubble: White Elephant MY ASS!

[Tomato42]

It's his daughter.

Could this be done from the ground?

[wisebabo]

I'm all for Hubble and am very happy they did the "risky" last servicing mission but I was just wondering, could this be done from the ground?

With ground based scopes around 10m in diameter the light capacity (except on a cloudy day!) would far surpass the Hubble. Do the "artificial" star techniques not work well enough!? Or maybe the dwell time is too long? Or maybe these images are in a part of the spectrum that doesn't go through the atmosphere?

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that the atmosphere would cause too much interference to be as useful as the hubble

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[k6mfw]

maybe not, maybe so. However, HST has advantage of grabbing headlines outside realm of astronomers with interesting observations. It reminds some of us "flatlanders" to look up and out and wonder.

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[Carnivore]

You're right in all of your suppositions. (Except for cloudy day--It's the cloudy nights you have to watch out for :)

Today's 10m class and tomorrow's 30m class telescopes can do a lot of what Hubble has done, especially when you factor in advanced AO systems like the one that was recently installed on Gemini South (one 50W laser split into 5 beams for correction over a large field). Anything on the ground is cheaper than in space.

Hubble, JWST, Chandra, and the others can see wavelengths that are absorbed by the atmosphere, no matter how high you are.

And integration time is a huge factor. The Ultra Deep Field image was over 1.1 million seconds of exposure. It's just not practical to do exposures like that from the ground.

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[wierdling]

I process data from the Hubble and also from the ESO Southern Observatory. And that images (and hence data) from the Hubble are still very much clearer than what the ESO SO can take. Not having to look through an ocean of air makes a huge difference.

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Hubble was launched, advances in adaptic optics have made it possible to capture images of similar quality from the ground. However, there is a trade-off. The nature of adaptive optics means that they are very good for imaging small regions of the sky. This is great if you want to examine a specific object with pinpoint accuracy. However, adaptive optics isn't good if you want to survey large areas of the sky - a space-based telescope such as Hubble is still the best choice for that kind of work. So it's really a question of what kind of science you want to do. For some sorts of work, ground-based telescopes are the way to go. For others, a space-based telescope allow you to perform work that wouyld take years from the ground in a fraction of the time.

However, keep in mind that adaptive optics didn't become common in astronomy until the late 1990s (although the theory was known since the 1950s).

Also, note that telescopes greater that 8m in diameter need to use a second technology known as Active Optics to correct for tiny deformations in the mirror caused by temperature changes - without this technology it is impossible to build telescopes much wider than 6-7m in diameter. This technology became available in the late 1980s and is the main reason why larger ground-based telescopes are becoming more common now.

So Hubble was launched only a few years before ground-based telescopes started to catch up with some of its capabilities - but it still has a few tricks up its sleeve that they find it hard to match.

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much atmospheric interference...that's the reason the Hubble was built in the first place.

Re:Could this be done from the ground?

[Tynin]

The Ultra Deep Field image was over 1.1 million seconds of exposure. It's just not practical to do exposures like that from the ground.

The 1.1 million seconds is interesting. As soon as I saw the number I wanted to figure out how many days that was. Turns out it is ~12.73 days. That time frame really made me think that whomever was controlling the scheduling kicked off this long picture very early Monday morning, at the start of their work week, and then waited till the following Friday, before heading home for the start of the weekend, to end the exposure.

I've been working business hours for just long enough this seemed like it must be right ;-)

wish a GF could do that

[Anonymous Coward]

"measure the disc's size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc"

wish I had a GF who could do that

Funny Interference Pattern

[Doc Ruby]

Looking at that image, the two main features look like symmetric interference patterns, fairly simple ones. Why not do the Fourier (or other) analysis to recompose the original light signals?

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[Tynin]

Looking at that image, the two main features look like symmetric interference patterns, fairly simple ones. Why not do the Fourier (or other) analysis to recompose the original light signals?

You might be right, but I think it is possible those are jets being emitted from the black hole... they say they were able to measure the temp across parts of it, the hottest parts blasting out of it could be those bright points on the image. It would be quite interesting if that was ever confirmed.

http://www.space.com/5285-powerful-black-hole-jet-explained.html

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[marcosdumay]

If my understanding of the article is correct, that is what they did.

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[jez9999]

Total noob question from me: that image has a white blob in the middle. If it's a black hold with a disc around it, why isn't the middle black?

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[f()rK()_Bomb]

As the black hole feeds it churns all the matter around it causing it to radiate light. As it pulls stuff in not all of it goes into the event horizon, some just whips around and flys out and smashes into the other incoming matter. This is what makes it a quasar, it is the active galactic nucleus. If its not feeding like the black hole in our galaxy then it would indeed be black. There is some good vids of stars orbiting the invisible mass at the centre of our galaxy actually. http://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=stars%20orbiting%20black%20hole&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CD4QtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqJ9IZF8Qdno&ctbm=vid&ei=LyK1Tv76Is-DhQffp7WdBA&usg=AFQjCNH1kwAkgdimMaASf-dllz4HVn30Sg&sig2=rtGLmTUs7GNXkwDeC1pMcg

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[aqualicious]

It would be interesting if it wasn't interference, since the inner square would be an indication of the discs relative speeds (aka Saturn's hexagon)

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[Doc Ruby]

But if they did, the image wouldn't be a symmetrical interference pattern. The original source light before interference would appear in the image.

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[Doc Ruby]

Even if it's the jets, the image of the jets looks like a fairly simple diffraction pattern in the image. Why not process the pattern into the original signal, whatever it is?

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[marcosdumay]

The image in the article looks like one'd expect a disk to look like through a lens. That means that it is a raw image (or a reconstruction of what a raw image is like) from the study, not the resulting render of the disk.

Re:Funny Interference Pattern

[Doc Ruby]

Right, that's what I'm saying: a the light of a disc's image interfering with itself in a lens.

What I'm asking is why they don't recompose the image of the disc to show us? I'm not nearly as interested in the light after gravity has lensed it, even if that's the technique this project used to get the disc. The point of the effort is the image of the disc.

Other uses for space telescopes

[fiannaFailMan]

Quoth TFA:

These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.

Hubble probably wasn't designed for this sort of thing, but imagine a space telescope that's designed for observing objects inside our solar system. It'd be like putting the moon under a microscope, or exploring Mars and getting detailed survey results without the time and expense of sending a probe there. Is it possible? Is it being planned?

Re:Other uses for space telescopes

[QuasiSteve]

imagine a space telescope that's designed for observing objects inside our solar system. It'd be like putting the moon under a microscope, or exploring Mars and getting detailed survey results without the time and expense of sending a probe there. Is it possible?

Not by traditional means, at least. Essentially, the resolving power of any telescope is limited and the only way to increase it is to use larger lenses. Looks like some articles disagree on the exact size needed for certain features, but google for "telescope flag moon" (minus quotes) for many answers to the question of whether you could see the U.S. flag on the Moon with a telescope, most of which also answer whether Hubble could see it, what you'd need to see it, etc.

Putting telescopes in orbit around the objects of interest still seems the best bet.

If you had a system that didn't care about optics it might fare better.. but then how would you measure things? Extremely fine movements of, say, a laser imager? Not sure how you'd keep the satellite stable enough :)

Re:Other uses for space telescopes

[JoeMerchant]

Quoth TFA:

These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.

Hubble probably wasn't designed for this sort of thing, but imagine a space telescope that's designed for observing objects inside our solar system. It'd be like putting the moon under a microscope, or exploring Mars and getting detailed survey results without the time and expense of sending a probe there. Is it possible? Is it being planned?

Gravitational lensing uses very heavy objects (stars, black holes, galaxies, galaxy clusters) to magnify objects on the other side.

We don't happen to have any of those between us and Mars, so it won't work. And, I'm just a little too foggy for the accuracy vs. precision discussion at the moment, but even if they managed to magnify these things so extraordinarily as to look at grains of sand on the moon, I doubt they really know if they're looking at coarse sand, fine sand, or small pebbles. After all, how many black hole accretion discs can they compare it to for reference?

Slowly being sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

in is a matter of perspective

Goatse in Five...

[Fned]

Four...

Three...

Precisely measure using gravitational lensing?!?

[JoeMerchant]

I appreciate the power of gravitational lensing, but to presume that you have anything resembling an accurate measurement when using it, unless they mean precisely, within an order of magnitude, or two.

Video of image capturing process

[TomBifkin]

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/

Re:Video of image capturing process

[kanweg]

Very informative. Do you happen to know how fast the changes are in real time?

Bert

Disc images?

[Dwonis]

You mean there isn't some sort of cosmic DRM that prevents this?

It's cool when you can ...

[Surt]

call an object 100 billion kilometers across 'small'.

Fringe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fringe effect!

I can just imaging all the religious fanatics going crazy over this ,and the people that try to use LHC for opening black holes and trying destroy the world!

Increasing mass and warping space.

[gal0xy77]

According to Einstein's General Theory (I think), the mass of an object increases as it approaches the speed of light. The amount of this increase depends on the position of the observer. My question is: At what point does the increasing mass begin to warp the space around it (relative to the observer)? Thanks in advance for any input, Roy