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

Hubble Space Telescope

[ackthpt]

Blowing your mind since 1990

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

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.

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: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.