How Astronomers Will Take the "Image of the Century": a Black Hole

An anonymous reader writes with news that scientists may be close to getting the first image of a black hole. "Researchers studying the universe are ramping up to take the image of the century — the first ever image of a supermassive black hole. While the evidence for the existence of black holes is compelling, Scientists will continue to argue the contrary until physical, observational evidence is provided. Now, a dedicated team of astrophysicists armed with a global fleet of powerful telescopes is out to change that. If they succeed, they will snap the first ever picture of the monstrously massive black hole thought to live at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. This ambitious project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is incredibly tricky, but recent advances in their research are encouraging the team to push forward, now. The reason EHT needs to be so complex is because black holes, by nature, do not emit light and are, therefore, invisible. In fact, black holes survive by gobbling up light and any other matter — nearby dust, gas, and stars — that fall into their powerful clutches. The EHT team is going to zoom in on a miniscule spot on the sky toward the center of the Milky Way where they believe to be the event horizon of a supermassive black hole weighing in at 4 million times more massive than our sun. We can still see the material, however, right before it falls into eternal darkness. The EHT team is going to try and glimpse this ring of radiation that outlines the event horizon. Experts call this outline the "shadow" of a black hole, and it's this shadow that the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes."

Comments

Red Dwarf question

[Vintermann]

Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the summary there is a clue.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

They thought they detected it, but in 50 years time it could well turn out to be a bit of grit.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[hcs_$reboot]

The many stars near the black hole shape its silhouette - like the Invisible man is visible if covered in paint. Or maybe the Hawking bh evaporation will help.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Buchenskjoll]

They'll use flash.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Black Parrot]

+1, wooshie

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

The larger a black hole is, the less intense its Hawking radiation. The one in the galactic centre is too big to emit any detectable Hawking radiation.

But yes, the silhouette of the black hole should be visible. Somewhat distorted, because light passing near the black hole is bent by gravity, but you can compensate for that.

Re: Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "African Stellar Person", you racist.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[thegarbz]

If you read the title of the post you were replying to, there would be another clue! About 1min in.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave the lens cap on, nobody will know.

Re: Red Dwarf question

[Anonymous Coward]

White people are born in Africa too you know. Say black when you mean black.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[BarbaraHudson]

I just find the claim of the "picture of the century" to be arrogant in the extreme.

We're only in the second decade of the 21st century. We don't know what will happen in the next 80-someodd years. In 1914, nobody could predict the pictures from the moon.

For example, what if there's a picture of a "first contact" 50 years from now?

Re:Red Dwarf question

[painandgreed]

Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?

Actually, in theory, they are not black, but have Hawking radiation that if could be detected accurately would be of some use to us confirming theory. Then there is the radiation given off by the things falling into them. Most black holes probably aren't observable because the region around them is opaque from all the energetic things going on before matter even hits the event horizon. Then, space isn't black, there is cosmic background microwaves, distant galaxies, gas clouds, etc. A black hole will obscure everything behind it and should be detectable just as taking a photo of a new moon would be because there is a noticeable area without stars. Even a black hole without and accretion disk should, with a good enough image, be detectable via occlusion of what we would expect to see in that area, not to mention the lensing of the objects visible around it.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[Bengie]

Yep. Seems a 1 solar mass BH would be 60nk compared to the 2.76k cosmic background radiation. A BH the mass of the Moon would break even.

Wiki: A black hole of one solar mass has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvin (60 billionths of a kelvin); in fact, such a black hole would absorb far more cosmic microwave background radiation than it emits. A black hole of 4.5 × 1022 kg (about the mass of the Moon) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[spitzak]

The Hawking radiation is very very tiny, and I am pretty certain is impossible to see. Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the black hole size.

Re:Red Dwarf question

[painandgreed]

The Hawking radiation is very very tiny, and I am pretty certain is impossible to see. Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the black hole size.

True, which I why I stated "detected accurately". In fact, for a super massive black hole it should be less than the background radiation from the big bang. Thus, we could expect naked black holes (not singularities) to possibly be a cold spot against the CMB.

Interstellar pic ?

[vikingpower]

I can not help but wonder at the question: "Will the produced image in any way resemble the black hole depiction in the 'Interstellar' movie ?"

Re:Interstellar pic ?

[pablo_max]

ah..yes, it does apparently.
http://thefilmstage.com/news/h...

Quasars?

[palemantle]

I didn't realize that there was still skepticism about the existence of super-massive black holes. If nothing else, we've detected about 200000 quasars - just about the brightest objects in the known universe - each indicating the presence (and proximity) of a supermassive blackhole.

I thought the general consensus was that there was a supermassive black hole at the centre of every galaxy although only some of these were active, thus showing up as quasars.

Don't know about this image of the century hyperbole. Quasars are stunning enough and have been seen and studied for what fifty years now.

Re:Quasars?

[Anonymous Coward]

We know supermassive black holes exist.

We know quasars exist and involve radiation blasted out from the fucktons of matter pouring into early-universe supermassive blackholes.

What has yet to happen is someone has yet to image the black part of the black hole. The region that's quite literally so dark that light just falls into it. (depending on how thin the accretion disk is, it might not actually be black -- but it's going to be a hell of a lot less energetic than the regions near the disc/equator!). That's the image of the century: not the radiation blasted out from relativistic shockwaves of the unholy weirdness near a black hole, but the relative blackness of the event horizon itself against the backdrop of aforementioned unholy weirdness.

No quasars around here, the universe is over that by now. We have no tech with resolution sufficient to image a stellar mass black hole in my lifetime. But the big-ass one a mere 30000 light years away? Being so (relatively speaking) close makes up for all the gas and dust that's in the way. That one's observable. And yes, I've been wanting to see that image for about 30 years, and it can't come too soon.

Black holes are not black

[pablo_max]

Actually, no, it is not black. In order to have a color, light must reflect off of the object. In a black hole, light does not escape it and therefor it has no color.
In fact, you cannot see a black hole at all. You would only know it's there because of the objects orbiting the event horizon.

Re:Black holes are not black

[mwvdlee]

This is semantics. Some people don't think of black and/or white as colors at all. Some people define black as a total absense of light (photons), others as an amount of light below the humanly visible treshold. You seem to define black as the latter, with the addition that atleast some light must be present. In the end, whether a black hole has the color black is a matter for dictionaries, not a matter of scientific fact (unless assuming a scientific definition of what the words "color" and "black" mean).

Re:Black holes are not black

[mark-t]

By its strictest definition, black does not reflect any light either, and so does not qualify as a color either. We can usually see so-called black objects either because they are perhaps just a very dark grey, and are thus still reflecting some amount of light that we can detect, or else in the case of something like Vantablack, because of objects nearby.

Re:Black holes are not black

[stoploss]

By its strictest definition, black does not reflect any light either, and so does not qualify as a color either. We can usually see so-called black objects either because they are perhaps just a very dark grey, and are thus still reflecting some amount of light that we can detect, or else in the case of something like Vantablack, because of objects nearby.

Nanotube/graphene based products like this Vantablack is going to be the new hotness for the next twenty years, then for the fifty years after that it's going to make generations of lawyers very wealthy due to the occupational/environmental exposure cancer claims.

Call it the 21st century asbestos.

Re:Black holes are not black

[oldmac31310]

Reflective: Black is 100% color

Transmissive: Black is %0 color

Depends on the context. As for black holes, maybe it was an unfortunate choice of nomenclature. Should we really be discussing the 'black' part of the name?

Re:Black holes are not black

[Bengie]

Some people define black as a total absense of light (photons)

This is a bad definition because it cannot happen in our Universe. All you can do is compare the "brightness" of an object against another object and define the "darker" object as being "black". But no object can be completely void of emitting photons, only less and less of them, approaching zero.

It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

> the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes."

It's already been proven. There is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and it's been named "Sagitarius A"

Using infrared telesopes, you can "see" stars orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Orbits of about 28 stars have been observed and using math, the mass of the stars and the required mass of the black hole has been calculated. Only a black hole can account for the kinds of orbits you see those stars doing.

It is a sight to behold and at first I could not believe it. Watching the stars at the frickin center of the galaxy orbit a black hole is a stunning sight once you truly grok what you are seeing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Realize that this video is not an artist's intepretation, but is actual imagery of stars orbiting something of immense mass, something which can only be a black hole.

Re:It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

Correction: It's called "Sagittarius A*" And NASA does not qualify it using terms such as "might be a black hole" or "theorised to be a black hole." They simply call it a "supermassive black hole"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

Re:It's already been proven.

[Buchenskjoll]

So, it's the Sagittarius A-hole?

Re:It's already been proven.

[matfud]

The stars are in the range of 900 to 3300 AU and period of 11 to 93 years. They are moving at a fair clip

Re:It's already been proven.

[pr0t0]

Unless those stars are orbiting outside the galactic plane, then I don't believe that is "actual imagery". Maybe it's a representation (based on the data) of what it would look like if you could hover above the galactic plane and look down at the black hole.

This is why this project seems strange to me. Why image our own galactic center? There's roughly 25,000 light years of dust and stars to see through. Why not image the center of a galaxy that's plane is perpendicular to us?

Re:It's already been proven.

[ShanghaiBill]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Realize that this video is not an artist's intepretation, but is actual imagery of stars orbiting something of immense mass, something which can only be a black hole.

Do you know the time scale of this video? Are these stars orbiting in hours, days, years?

Re:It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

> There's roughly 25,000 light years of dust and stars to see through.

You're right... it would be impossible to view those stars using the optical spectrum. However, the scientists in this case, and for the multi-year time-lapse loop I linked to used radio waves which were unaffected by dust. One might think that interposing stars would block out the view (after all, the view is sideways through the "platter" of the galaxy) but given the far separation of the stars, the view is not blocked even at such vast distances.

I initially shared your incredulity, and I did the research, and that is indeed a radio image of the actual stars at the center of our galaxy.

Re:It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

Years. That is a time lapse loop, and the current year is in the upper left corner.

Re:It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

> Why not image the center of a galaxy that's plane is perpendicular to us?

Another factor: on that video I linked, the scale on those images is 10 light days. I don't think modern astronomy can resolve individual stars on that fine a scale, which would be required to produce the same effect while viewing another galaxy.

That's another thing that makes that image amazing to me... how close those stars are. 10 light days is nothing, cosmically speaking.

Re:It's already been proven.

[Le Marteau]

Saying that radio images translated so we can view them in at a freqency visible to us are not "real" is like saying images produced using night vision goggles are not real.

The waves involved in this issue are not part of the observable spectrum for humans. Converting them to visible frequencies for our observation does not make them any less "real" except to the pedantic or to those of us who go as far as to say that observable science can't prove anything.

Re:Revelation 9:1

[VanessaE]

Except....that a black home has a bottom. There's nothing infinite about them, except in some formulas (i.e. the _mathematical_ singularity at the center). If the black hole is big enough (around 150 billion solar masses), you could even stand more or less comfortably on its surface, normal earth-like gravity, provided the radiation doesn't kill you.

How can it prove it when

[Prune]

The surface of the collapsing star takes an infinite time to cross the event horizon form the point of view of an outside observer? No star which has collapsed has yet turned into a black hole, and no one will at a finite age of the outside universe. The only way to prove the existence of a black hole is to fall through an event horizon. Of course, then you only prove it for yourself, and cannot tell anyone else.

Re:How can it prove it when

[amaurea]

In general your model is broken because you're not considering the metric. The most important effect you are neglecting in this case is the time-time component of the metric, which indicates how quickly stationary local clocks tick compared to coordinate time (there is also the radius-radius component which tells you that the event horizon is much further away than you would naively think, but we'll ignore that here). It looks like this for the metric outside a nonrotating, uncharged, massive body: 1-R/r, where R is the Schwartzchild radius of that source, and r is a radial coordinate. At large distances this factor approaches 1, so coordinate time moves at the same speed as the time of a far-away observer, such as us here on earth. But as r approaches R, the factor goes to 0. So time close to the horizon moves ever more slowly as one gets closer to it, according to our far-away reference frame. That is why crossing the horizon takes an infinite amount of (our) time.

However, the frequency and intensity of light is multiplied by the same factor, and very quickly becomes almost zero. So you would not see the object hanging there forever. You would see it quickly fade to blackness, leaving an incredibly faint and ever fainter afterimage in far radio wavelengths.

Re:How can it prove it when

[MrKevvy]

I'm glad this long-overlooked idea is finally being remembered. It does lead to two further conclusions of course: how can these frozen collapsing stars have spin? And how can they have magnetic fields or (detectable) electric charge?

It doesn't seem they could have either, so all the physics done on rotating and/or charged/magnetic black holes with real singularities seems to be making the rather large assumption that there are any that were formed at the birth of the universe. They can't form now so quite possibly don't exist. It has been shown that relativistic jets, for example, can be generated by the magnetic field of the accretion disc without requiring a spinning black hole.

Re:How can it prove it when

[mark-t]

I might suggest that you may only be correct about your assumptions in that no star which has collapsed has yet turned into a singularity... all that is required for a black hole is sufficiently bending space in the region of a mass such that no straight line near the mass, and where it is within some finite volume as measured from outside of that region, ever leaves said vicinity of the mass. It is entirely possible that the entire universe may be within a black hole, which itself is inside of another, much larger and much older universe.

Re:How can it prove it when

[amaurea]

If I understand correctly, higher gravity makes time pass more slowly

Correct. Or to be more general, time passes more slowly deep down in a gravitational well

so a clock in lower gravity will register more time from its perspective than the clock in higher gravity.

Yes. Every time a clock on earth ticks 1 time a (stationary) clock near a black hole will tick 1-R/r times. For example, a clock at a distance r=10/9*R will only tick 0.1 times every time a clock on earch ticks 1 time. The same applies to all other physical processes, not just clocks. So a person on Earch could wave their arms 10 times every time a person that close to the blck hole could wave them once. Or a person on earch could think 10 thoughts in the time a person close tot he black hole could think 1.

Therefore, from the reference frame of an object falling into a black hole it would seem that it takes forever.

No. If time goes slowly for somebody they don't percieve themselves to be going slowly, they see everything else going very quickly. From the reference frame of an infalling object, their clocks are ticking at normal speed (by definition - a local clock measures how fast physical processes happen locally). But the far-away world seems to be sped up.

But from our frame of reference, time passes normally,

Time passes normally to everybody in their own frame of reference.

so we would observe the object falling into the event horizon just as we would an object falling into a star, minus the red shift and vanishing?

No. In our frame of reference, all physical processes near the black hole, be that clocks, falling people or light, are moving in slow motion. In the absene of red shifts and other optical phenomena, we would observe the object to inch closer and closer to the horizon ever more slowly until it's hardly moving. A photon next to them would similarly move extremely slowly (the speed of light as measured locally is constant, but not in other parts of spacetime).

I guess what you thought was something along the lines of "people in areas where time moves quickly will see everything move quickly, and people in areas where time moves slowly will see everything move slowly". To see why that doesn't make any sense, imagine if I had a slow-ray and shot it at you. It would slow you down, but not me. But because I'm not slowed down doesn't mean that I will see you moving at normal speed. Your time passes more slowly than mine, so I will see you move more slowly than me. And since your mind is also affected by the speed of time, you won't perceive yourself to be moving any slower than normal. But to you the rest of the world would look like a movie in fast-forward mode.

So I have a hard time understanding how it would take an infinite time from the perspective of an outside observer

I hope this helps.

Edge on perspctive

[TapeCutter]

Earth is orbiting the BH in the galactic plane, so wouldn't the ring of fire be seen edge on from our perspective?

Re:Edge on perspctive

[codewarren]

enhance!

Re:Edge on perspctive

[RavenLrD20k]

maybe... but you seem to be thinking that a black hole is a disk. Super-massive gravity wells, as with other gravity wells, are most likely spherical. If there's matter close enough that are within the galactic plane tolerances, but a bit above or below the well relative to our perspective, there's nothing that says the orbital decay pattern couldn't be in a rotation that we'd see like soap being pulled down a drain as opposed to streaks going across the well's equator.

Re:Edge on perspctive

[Anonymous Coward]

The black hole is not a disk. But accretion disks are disks. AKA "ring of fire".

The angle of the disk matches the rotation of the hole, and the hole should roughly match the rotation of the galaxy overall, and since we're in the galaxy, we'll thus most likely be edge on to the disk.

Re:Edge on perspctive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is kind of expected and a good thing. The accretion disk will still be transparent to a lot of signals of interest, but now there is the added benefit of seeing stuff from both the co-rotating and counter-rotating edge of the black hole which will help confirm and measure any rotation. If we were seeing it from some place closer to the poles, it would be much more difficult to see the rotation effects, which otherwise cause a difference in the amount of light that wraps around since it is easier for light to wrap around in the direction of rotation.

Re:Edge on perspctive

[vikingpower]

You overlook one thing: bending of light by the super-intense gravity of the black hole. The "back" side of the accretion disk, i.e. the side turned away from us, emits light. The black hole's gravity will pull that light around the bh and bend it in all possible ways; see Kip Thorne's results found in simulating the Gargantua black hole for the move "Interstellar", he's actually working on a physics / astrophysics paper with his findings. Bending of the accretion disk's light, which the bh will throw forward to us, will produce a halo effect around the bh. What you'd expect to see would be an intensely black sphere, surrounded by a great glow. ( The glow, btw, would be there in nearly all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio through infrared and visible light into the hardest X-ray reaches. )

Re:Edge on perspctive

[TapeCutter]

Thanks, good answer to my original question. :)

Save the trouble and our tax dollars

[rodrigoandrade]

Here, I got your work cut out for you:

https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1440&bih=811&q=black+hole&oq=black+hole&gs_l=img.3..0l10.1410.3802.0.4788.10.9.0.1.1.0.267.1084.0j2j3.5.0.msedr...0...1ac.1.58.img..4.6.1087.Tj8XnhV53ww

Re:Save the trouble and our tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, fuck yeah. Science is a waste of money, build more churches.

That's nitpicking

[amaurea]

The surface will get very close to the apparent horizon very quickly though, and after that it will be so redshifted that it looks just like one of the idealized black hole solutions, and will be indistinguishable from one to any observer. It will be just as black, just as compact and just attractive, and still deserves to be called a black hole. When people say "black hole" they don't necessarily mean "Schwartzchild black hole" or "Kerr black hole".

Has it been proven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stars at the outer edge of the galaxy take the same amount of time to rotate around the galaxy as the inner stars. How can you calculate the mass of the center in this case? If you pick a closer star you will end up with a smaller mass than if you pick an outer star using the same equations.

Not sure that is proof at all, and from what I remember they recently came up with some new theory that said black holes can't exist (not that this new theory is any better). So I'm not sure there is proof they exist yet, but there is evidence they do.

Re:Has it been proven?

[mark-t]

Not sure that is proof at all, and from what I remember they recently came up with some new theory that said black holes can't exist (not that this new theory is any better)

Yeah... a new theory where instead of going through a thorough peer review process first, the person who came up with it simply had a press release about it, giving the theory loads of disproportionate publicity over time-tested theories that explain what we observe far more readily.

In actuality, that recently announced theory that black holes don't exist, if you actually read carefully what they are really saying, is that it is singularities which are impossible... and they only conclude that black holes are impossible from that by suggesting that any black hole must have a singularity at the center. This is a commonly accepted idea, but it has never been scientifically proven... it is implied only by the fact that we can find no evidence of any force in the universe which could prevent it. There are, however, alternative explanations for how a black hole might not contain a singularity which do not require any particular force to act against the gravitational pull within the event horizon... explanations that the recently publicized theory you mentioned does not even attempt to address.

Re:SHUT THE FUCK UP, SLASHDOT!

[ColdWetDog]

Ads? What are you about?

If you can see ads on the Internet, you're doing it wrong.

Business Insider?

[jbmartin6]

What use is a link to a science article on Business Insider? Here is the EHT project home page It seems the goals of the project are a lot more interesting than simply proving black holes exist.

I work on this project...

[NixieBunny]

If you have any actual questions about how it's done. I might be able to shed some light on what this thing is. It involves masers and 4K fridges and some rather high IF frequencies.

Re:I thought that black holes don't exist?!??

[amaurea]

It would be nice if science reported were color coded or something. Green for robust, independently verified and generally accepted stuff (general relativity, evolution, etc.), yellow for new stuff that's not yet independently verified but in line with well-tested models, and red for stuff that's exciting but very uncertain and/or likely to be wrong (faster-than-light neutrinos, string theory, dark matter annihilation observations in galaxies, etc). The sort of stuff you read about in the news is usually red or yellow, but is presented as if it were green. The article you quote falls squarely into the red category.

How so?

[amaurea]

What about this story makes you think Hawking radiation doesn't exist? We can't be completely sure it exists because we don't have any observations of it, but there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe it should exist. But for non-tiny black holes, it is extremely faint, so faint that we have no hope of observing it. For example, the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way would be expected to radiate 3.6e-48 W. That's 1 with 50 zeros behind it times weaker than a light bulb!

I have some questions

[amaurea]

When will observations start? How long will they last? When can we expect to see results on arXiv? How well will the fourier plane be covered (will you still need telescopes in the middle of nowhere to join/be built)? What will the spatial and temporal resolution be? Are there any important astrophysical foregrounds that could mess things up (blurring by plasma sheaths is something I think I've heard mentioned)? How are they handled? Did you know from the beginning that ALMA would join? Can you expect any other big boosts? How wide a frequency range do you have? How large an area in the neighborhood of the black holes you target will you be able to see? Could you expect to discover any nearby stellar black holes or neutron stars (I think one would expect a population of these in the general area)?

Re:I have some questions

[NixieBunny]

I work on the engineering side, rather than the project management side. The two EHT telescopes that I work on are in Arizona, although I build some of the hardware that's being taken to the South Pole Telescope. It's getting improved to be a part of the EHT. One of the Arizona telescopes is a prototpye ALMA antenna that we just moved here from New Mexico last year, and got working a month ago.

Observations are typically done in March/April. This gives good weather at the many sites involved. The typical run is a week, and they try to get several 10-minute recordings during that time period. The data is recorded at 1 Gbyte/sec onto banks of hard drives, then shipped by FedEx to MIT for correlation. (I don't know if a FedEx truck makes it to the South Pole every day.)

The frequency used for most observations in in the 1.3mm band. The baselines are intercontinental (Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, hopefully Antarctica), up to 5000 miles. The goal is to actually get fringes between all stations, although that's not always possible due to weather and/or equipment acting up.

Re:I have some questions

[amaurea]

The two EHT telescopes that I work on are in Arizona, although I build some of the hardware that's being taken to the South Pole Telescope. It's getting improved to be a part of the EHT. One of the Arizona telescopes is a prototpye ALMA antenna that we just moved here from New Mexico last year, and got working a month ago.

That's intereting. I didn't know that the EHT worked at SPT-relevant frequencies. I work on data analyis for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, a very similar telescope to SPT, and a neighbor of ALMA. So I've seen the ALMA telescopes up close several times.

Observations are typically done in March/April. This gives good weather at the many sites involved.

Isn't the weather often bad at the ALMA site in that period? In ACT we've used that period for maintenance.

The typical run is a week, and they try to get several 10-minute recordings during that time period. The data is recorded at 1 Gbyte/sec onto banks of hard drives, then shipped by FedEx to MIT for correlation. (I don't know if a FedEx truck makes it to the South Pole every day.)

That's a lot of hard drives! Is that the aggregate data rate for all the telescopes, or just for SPT?

Except, it's a Wormhole

[oh_my_080980980]

Supermassive Black Hole At The Centre Of The Galaxy May Be A Wormhole In Disguise, Say Astronomers https://medium.com/the-physics...

Re:Except, it's a Wormhole

[amaurea]

That's a fascinating article, but you won't find many astrophysicists who would bet on it being correct (this probably includes the authors). Traversable wormholes are unstable without large amounts of negative mass, and we have no reason to believe that such exotic matter even exists. And if one is willing to assume that these wormholes have been there since the beginning of the universe in order to explain the presence of compact massive bodies in the center of every galaxy, then you might as well assume that black holes have been there since the beginning of the universe - that requires much less speculative new physics while solving the same problems. And those problems aren't that convincing in the first place - properly including baryons in cosmological simulations may well turn out to produce the right amount of large black holes when we get good enough computers to run them.

This is a typical case of somebody doing a fun "what if" or "devil's advocate" calculation, and the media turning it into something much more definite than it is.

Lunar Imagery

[Tenebrousedge]

In 1914, nobody could predict the pictures from the moon.

Except for that guy that did and made a film about it. His images aren't really that similar to the lunar terrain that we considered safe to land on, but 1914 wasn't as backwards as you seem to think. That said, your general point stands: predicting the future is hard. Likely whether or not we have more incredible images in the future, we'll say they're more incredible anyway. Especially if funding levels were commensurate with headlines.

Wait....

[Berkyjay]

How can anyone argue that black holes don't exist? I mean we've tracked stars at the center of our galaxy orbiting something at extreme speeds. We've never seen electrons, but we've all but confirmed their existence by how they interact with our environment.

Re:Wait....

[iggymanz]

It is possible quantum mechanics prevents formation of a black hole, instead there could be a form of degenerate or exotic matter. We don't have a useable theory of quantum gravitation yet to know what happens when the realms of GR and QM overlap

Re:Revelation 9:1

[wonkey_monkey]

Except....that a black home has a bottom.

I seem to remember Hawking saying something of the sort recently, but I don't recall it being decided one way or the other.

If the black hole is big enough (around 150 billion solar masses), you could even stand more or less comfortably on its surface

If you can stand comfortably, couldn't you also easily escape. What do you mean by "surface"? Do you mean the event horizon, or the surface of the hypothetical 150 billion solar mass object inside the event horizon?

You can survive crossing the event horizon of a sufficiently large black hole because the tidal forces are low, but I thought you'd need approaching infinite force to remain stationary at the horizon.

Re:Revelation 9:1

[Bengie]

What do you mean by "normal Earth-like gravity"? The "surface" of a black hole is where gravity is nearly the speed of light. the only good news is that for a large BH, the gradient would not be very drastic at its surface, but it would still be c.

Ob. Event Horizon Quote+

[DarthVain]

I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much, much farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure... evil. When she crossed over, she was just a telescope. But when she came back... she was alive! Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?