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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.
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...
You need to learn to live with strange happenings when you're dealing with black holes.
It's all about your frame of reference.
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Yes, the era of people not knowing how to infer has just ended. Congrats on the new era's first post! That was exquisite timing; I'm jealous.
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1. Uh, you DO realize Hugh Hefner died in 2017 right?
2. His last name is Hawking
"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.
better use 8 radio-telescopes for 8 months.
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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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.
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
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.
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