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.

Comments

Bravo!

[Evtim]

I hope they keep on working....after all black holes are among the very few mysteries left to figure out and a possible source of development of "new physics". I was rather crushed that the LHC did not find anything new....confirming the Higgs was great but expected....I was hoping for new mysteries that might lead to something Sci-Fi like such as teleportation or FTL travel. Ahhh, reality is a harsh mistress!

Finally putting an end....

[mark-t]

... to the argumentative position of "How can we know they exist if we can't see them?"

Thank you, science... hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.

Re:Finally putting an end....

[alvinrod]

and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.

Oh you sweet summer child.

If knowledge were sufficient to remove idiocy, we'd have been rid of it centuries ago. The only thing more frustrating than arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they cannot use basic reason, is arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they ignore all evidence.

Re:You don't know anything about how it was taken.

[mark-t]

I think you completely missed my point.... When the subject comes up, I have maintained for at least the past two decades that black holes really do exist. I have gotten into rather heated discussions on this subject with many people, and *BY FAR*, the most frequent objection I have heard from others to their existence is that we supposedly can't know they exist because we can't see them. This is an argument from ignorance, and is one that I absolutely loathe.

Obviously other no less ignorant arguments might exist, but hopefully this particular one can finally be put to bed.

Wow.

[apoc.famine]

I'm truly in awe at this. I just looked at a picture of the black hole in the center of M87. It is mindblowingly far away, and one of the most exotic things in the universe.

I honestly never thought that we'd do something like this in my lifetime.

100 years ago we didn't know that black holes existed. In essentially one human lifetime we went from not knowing something existed to building a planet-sized telescope to look at it. It is so far away that while we can put numbers on it, it's still just an abstraction because we can't really understand the scale of what we're dealing with.

Think of how far 1000 miles or 1000 km really is. Imagine driving that. Imagine walking that. Now slap 11 zeros onto that. No, not "imagine it 11 times", 11 orders of magnitude larger. Imagine that 1000 miles/km is the width of a human hair. Slice the earth and half and lay them down to span the diameter of the earth. That's ballpark the scale that we're talking about. Imagine how many hairs it would take to span the diameter of the earth. It's an unfathomable number. That's how many times 1000 miles away this thing is.

When the light left the accretion disk around this black hole, the K-T extinction event was relatively recent history.

And with SpaceX seriously cutting launch costs, and potentially being able to reliably reach past the moon's orbit, we'll likely have telescopes with an effective resolution larger than the earth in the not-too-distant future, and we'll be able to image this and other things in even higher resolution.

Holy shit are we an incredible species.

Re:You don't know anything about how it was taken.

[barakn]

Most of us have never seen Donald Trump in person, so any images we have seen of him are blurry blob of colors from number crunching a vast amount of data. And yet we all know what we are seeing and trust that he's real. Your problem appears to be that you don't trust math. That's your problem, don't hang it on us.