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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...
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!
Thank you, science... hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It is artificially colored. The actual "color" of the disk is not in the visible spectrum
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You need to learn to live with strange happenings when you're dealing with black holes.
There is a 10 meter telescope at the South Pole that has been in operation since 2007.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It's all about your frame of reference.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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 actual black hole itself cannot be imaged. Light falling through the event horizon is pretty much gone (what exactly happens to it is still a mystery, and one of the problems of not having a unified theory encompassing GR and QM). But what has been seen is the shadow of the event horizon.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"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....
Right, just like I say every time I see the picture of a cat. "Is it really a picture of a cat, or just the light bouncing off a cat?" ...
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.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Forget it, he’s rolling.
Veritasium did an excellent summary of how to understand and interpret what you're seeing in the image. Before the image was actually posted, he drew what all the models were anticipating, and you can see a lot of the features he spoke about in the actual image.
YouTube
When I saw the movie Interstellar, their image of a black hole seemed really hokey, but there's a reason for the way they drew it and it seems like parts of their conceptualization holds up fairly well.
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After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
If you watch the Werner Herzog documentary/movie "Encounters at the End of the World" they have an interview with the guy that runs the telescope, and also some footage - pretty cool.
There's also a whole book around it though pretty dense, called The Telescope in the Ice if you want to know more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I sprayed my cat with Vantablack, now she's just a two dimensional shape shifting blob moving around.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I always figured the term black whole refers to the entire structure; singularity, accretion disk, event horizon, relativistic jets (is that what they really call those? Pretty cool if so), etc. So we do get to see the black hole, except for certain parts of it, like the singularity and anything behind the outer layer of the event horizon.
I guess a simple analogy would be that you consist of the visible you and what is beneath the skin. Unless you find a way to bend light around yourself, we still see you; we just don't get to see the underlying components of you.
(Okay, the analogy sounded better in my brain, but it works well enough for this discussion.)
The real mind fuck question is "What would a singularity look like?"
This space unintentionally left blank.
It's a post to someone who thinks black holes can't exist at all. "Sphere" is close enough.
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.
You haven't really read the bible until you've read it in the original Klingon.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Radio behaves exactly the same as all other EM radiation, we just think of the various types in different terms - e.g. gamma and X-ray are generally thought of in energy units (eV), UV/visible/IR in wavelength (nm), and microwave/radio in frequency (Hz).
The famous 21-cm hydrogen line, detected by radio telescope at 1420MHz, is a well-understood quantum phenomenon and is definitely an emission of a photon It's just detected electronically, rather than by a photochemical reaction of a silver halide on film. Same as most visible light photos these days...so I'd say while I get your gut feeling, there's realistically no difference between a radio telescope image and an optical one nowadays.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Learn the skills and you are free to go and double-check their work, if you wish. Until you do that, it's just blather. Then some idiot will come up to you and say you're lying, it's all just religion.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
the event horizon is not a "stopped thing"
black holes do grow from our frame of reference as things fall in, actually it's wrong to say things slow down as they approach the event horizon, instead the event horizon grows to engulf those things as they are slowing. The simplistic explanations of things falling into black holes in popular press are wrong.
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.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
We still haven't imaged a black hole. All we've managed to do is image a black hole's accretion disk.
In addition, LIGO has captured a few brief snapshots of black holes getting jiggy. But I'd wait another year on that one, until we're extra sure that the sophisticated LIGO software isn't taking phantom snapshots of it's own software-filter afterimage.
Perhaps you should begin by schooling the Hillbillies in the community hot tub whom you persistently engage what it means for modern science to "image" something. Just for starters, atomic force microscopes are blind as a bat (though really damn good at Braille).
Is it really a picture of a black hole, or is it just a picture of the stuff surrounding something purported to be a black hole?
If you take a picture of a hole in the ground, is it really a picture of the hole, or just a picture of the stuff surrounding the hole? Do you routinely question the existence of holes in the ground?
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.
Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.
Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.