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Black Hole Picture Captured For First Time in Space 'Breakthrough' (theguardian.com)
Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself -- a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape -- is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
https://youtu.be/Dr20f19czeE
The live press conference is the source of any article which will be linked, for now
Why link to The Guardian when you can view the formal paper in all its glory - including multiple images taken over the course of a week: https://iopscience.iop.org/jou...
It is artificially colored. The actual "color" of the disk is not in the visible spectrum
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
1. Uh, you DO realize Hugh Hefner died in 2017 right?
2. His last name is Hawking
I can't even get a decent photo of my black cat.
"The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across." - https://eventhorizontelescope....
it was not "captured" but computer generated. this is no photo. radio telescopes don't take pictures, they record waves. Am I wrong?
True, and optical telescopes (mk 1 eyeball being the lowest technology example) just record em waves too. Most of the best cameras these days use computer chips to generate the image. So it seems like any other camera to me, just with a bit of a different lens and processing system.
Um, even cameras record waves. The radio telescope is able to detect photons outside the human visual spectrum range, but they are still photons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The black hole from Interstellar is actually NOT a "concept drawing", it was rendered by a relativistic ray tracing software. There is even a refereed paper in a scientific journal about the code (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001). Only the relativistic color and brightness shift of the disc were left out because they were deemed too confusing for the movie audience.
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question... aRTee
That is much of what you are seeing. The ring you see in their photo is the accretion disk, but it is actually the back top and bottom of the accretion disk behind the black hole that shows up due to gravitational lensing. The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge. The bright area of the ring is the side spinning towards us and the dim away from us. The accretion disk probably goes through the center of the shadow and the dim part between the two brighter spots. Perpendicular to that, you can see faint areas outside the black hole that are probably the jets. The black area is the shadow, basically, the area where light from behind is dragged into the black hole. This is 2.6 times the size of the actual black hole's event horizon. This is a very fuzzy image made from different pictures with a resolution of a bit smaller the size of the shadow we are seeing. That's what I've learned in the last half hour of watching you tube videos explaining what they expect to see and how to interpret it anyhow.
Oh, there's no lack of mysteries. There's still no data at all on what dark matter actually is, beyond "matter, cold, interacts weakly". Dark energy is just as mysterious. Heck, even inflation, which has been a primary focus of cosmology for over a decade, is merely a well-studied mystery.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. This entire endeavor was about $50-60 million, about half of which was directly funded by the NSF (tax money). By comparison, just one F-35 fighter jet is about $100 million.