First Photo of a Black Hole

@thack45,

Didn’t know about this but yeah, exciting

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@thack45,

I suppose scientists will know how to photograph things with such strong gravitation that light cannot escape.

That isn't me, of course.

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@thack45,

I’m looking foreword to the information, but I’m sure the photo will be something only an astronomer would love.

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@roger,

roger wrote:

I suppose scientists will know how to photograph things with such strong gravitation that light cannot escape.

That isn't me, of course.

Photograph seems to me to be a very poor choice in how the imaging should be described. And secondly, what the scientists will likely be imaging is not the black hole itself but all the physical side effects that occur directly outside the black hole's event horizon. As pathetically as I understand it, astronomers aren't directly imaging the black hole but (beyond?) the event horizon itself.

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@roger,

roger wrote:

I suppose scientists will know how to photograph things with such strong gravitation that light cannot escape.
That isn't me, of course.

This will be a radio telescope image. They are not collecting anything from the visible spectrum.

It will presumably show the accretion disk, the distortion of light paths near the black hole, and the absence of light directly from the black hole. Something like this perhaps:

http://discovermagazine.com/~/media/Images/Issues/2018/April/black-hole-1.jpg

The apparent warping of the accretion disk to flow "above" the black hole in the image is actually light emitted from the back of the accretion disk being bent around the top of the black hole.

If you've seen Interstellar, the black hole shown in that movie is close to what scientists believe a black hole really looks like.

After they do the black hole at the center of our galaxy, they plan to get an image of the black hole at the center of M87, that really huge galaxy at the center of the Virgo Supercluster (of which our own local group of galaxies is only an outlying member).

What blows my mind is, they say that they are doing it next because these are the two largest black holes in our sky in terms of how big the image appears from earth.

M87 is quite a good distance away from us. For the central black hole there to be the second largest-appearing one in our sky it must be unbelievably huge.

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@thack45,

April 10 is my birthday, so I'm going to take this release of information as my astronomical birthday present for 2019 Smile

If it comes with a pretty picture that will be extra nice, but I expect to see a starry smudge.

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https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/eht_black_hole_picture.png

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Not sure, By the way looking awesome.

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Picture unveiled. It is a blurry mess as Rosborne speculated. Nothing that would make a great computer screen background.

It's the black hole from M87 that they released the image of, not the one in our own galaxy.

Will try to get a link to a picture and post it here, unless someone beats me to it.

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http://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/2019/04/main/articles/041019_LG-EV-MT_EHT_feat.jpg

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@oralloy,

A face of an astronomical object that an all powerful, universe creating deity could love?

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@oralloy,

It's so beautiful

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@chai2,

chai2 wrote:

It's so beautiful

WAIT?! Are you the all powerful, universe creating deity the world has been waiting for?

1 Reply

@tsarstepan,

No, but I'm having lunch with her later this week.

Seriously, it's lovely and very powerful (obviously)

It's much more detailed than I ever would have expected.

I mean, it's 55 million light years away.

1 Reply

@chai2,

It looks like a Krispy Kreme glazed donut

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"Any matter that wanders beyond the event horizon is consumed by the black hole, but as gasses pile up just outside of the event horizon, they are heated to hundreds of billions of degrees, emitting an enormous amount of radiation across the galaxy."
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/astronomers-capture-first-images-supermassive-black-hole-180971927/#JM1yUO6CXcv7sjLP.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

Above a few thousand degrees atoms dissociate into ions and free electrons, and temperature becomes meaningless. What they do is measure speeds of particles and convert that number into an equivalent temperature. Temperature is defined as random motion, and speed is not random.

Black hole theory violates several known laws, one of them being the law of gravity. Newton published his shell theorem showing that gravity in a solid sphere decreases to zero at the center. That is because all the mass is pulling away from the center, so the net effect is zero. So gravity can't build up the way the theory says it can. Another part of the theory is that electrons and protons can be squeezed together to make neutrons. I am told that has been observed, but I have not verified those observations, and I very doubt that they were brought about by gravity because electrical repulsion is like 10^39 times as strong as gravity. Third, a nucleus can only exist with certain combinations of protons and neutrons called islands of stability, and as the nuclei get larger the islands of stability get farther apart. If a collection is off by even one particle it flies apart instantly. So neutronium is impossible.

What we have here is people pretending to know something when they don't.

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It was a woman who made it all possible.

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/katiebouman.jpg

Quote:

A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.

Katie Bouman led development of a computer programme that made the breakthrough image possible.

The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday.

For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible.

Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop.

"Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post.

She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.

The black hole image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a network of eight linked telescopes - was rendered by Dr Bouman's algorithm.

In the hours after the photo's momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter.

Dr Bouman was also hailed by MIT and the Smithsonian on social media.

"3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole," MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab wrote. "Today, that image was released."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47891902<br />

1 Reply

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/m87_black_hole_size_comparison.png

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

Wow. This is actually a LOT smaller than I expected.

1 Reply

First Photo of a Black Hole

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