Support NeoGAF

[JORMBO]

https://www.foxnews.com/science/first-ever-black-hole-image-revealed

Scientists have released the first ever image of a black hole, revealing the distant object in stunning detail.

The groundbreaking discovery was made by the Event Horizon Telescope, an international project involving telescopes across the globe that describes itself as a “virtual Earth-sized telescope.” Telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Mexico, Spain and the South Pole participated in the ambitious research project.

The black hole was spotted in a galaxy called M87 that is 55 million light years away. A light year, which measures distance in space, equals 6 trillion miles.

 

[womfalcs3]

Beautiful.

 

[Musky_Cheese]

Thats incredible

Also I think Soto hit one last night that may have reached that Black Hole

 

[Skyr]

stunning detail?

Ah I'll take it..

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

Wow!

Can't believe we're able to take imagery already.

I'm excited to see more and more of these.

 

[Dontero]

stunning detail?

Ah I'll take it..

I don't think you realize what it is.
It is photo of an object that is at the center of other galaxy than ours which is 59 MILLION LIGHTS YEARS away from us and photo of black hole aka object you can't even see normally, only when something is going into it.

The very idea that you can see any detail is mindblowing and you can clearly see acrecion disc surrounding black-hole.

This is the best photo we have of Alpha Centauri which is closest star to us just 4 light years away from us:

 

[TheUsual]

Watch out for The Collector Base!!!

 

[MetalAlien]

It's nice but I want to see the break down of all the stuff that looks wrong with the image. They know what they expected to see, now compare that to what they actually see.

EDIT also weren't they trying to take a picture of the one in our galaxy? What happened to that one? I wish Hitokage was alive to see these... he would have been freaking out!

 

[womfalcs3]

Although it has already been proven, this further proves Einstein's Special and General Relativity theroeies.

 

[Skyr]

I don't think you realize what it is.
It is photo of an object that is at the center of other galaxy than ours which is 59 MILLION LIGHTS YEARS away from us and photo of black hole aka object you can't even see normally, only when something is going into it.

The very idea that you can see any detail is mindblowing and you can clearly see acrecion disc surrounding black-hole.

This is the best photo we have of Alpha Centauri which is closest star to us just 4 light years away from us:

should have used manual focus tho...

Spoiler

I'm kidding

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

Is this a "top down" view? Would that mean the bright spots on the bottom-right are stars or clouds of gas the black hole is feeding on?

 

[MetalAlien]

Is this a "top down" view? Would that mean the bright spots on the bottom-right are stars or clouds of gas the black hole is feeding on?

Yea I mean without the breakdown of what they think they are seeing it's just a tease.

 

[JORMBO]

Is this a "top down" view? Would that mean the bright spots on the bottom-right are stars or clouds of gas the black hole is feeding on?

It sounds like they still need to do further research. This is just the start.
https://www.space.com/first-black-hole-photo-by-event-horizon-telescope.html

The new results should also help scientists get a better handle on black holes, he and other researchers said. For example, EHT imagery will likely shine significant light on how gas spirals down into a black hole's maw. This accretion process, which can lead to the generation of powerful jets of radiation, is poorly understood, Loeb said.

In addition, the shape of an event horizon can reveal whether a black hole is spinning, said Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology, the principal investigator of NASA's black-hole-studying Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission.
"We've inferred the spin of black holes indirectly," Harrison, who's not part of the EHT team, told Space.com. EHT imagery provides "a direct test, which is very exciting," she added.

EHT's data should also reveal how matter is distributed around a black hole, and the project's observations could eventually teach astronomers a great deal about how supermassive black holes shape the evolution of their host galaxies over long time scales, Harrison said.

 

[Aggelos]

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole
An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].

The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."

 

[Von Hugh]

Instantly reminded me of

 

[womfalcs3]

Is this a "top down" view? Would that mean the bright spots on the bottom-right are stars or clouds of gas the black hole is feeding on?

Since space-time warps because of the black hole's gravitational pull, the image looks the way it does. One side has the higher light intensity.

 

[Ownage]

The image of the black hole truly looks sinister to me.

Thats incredible

Also I think Soto hit one last night that may have reached that Black Hole

I read this as Juan Solo, which would be rad.

 

[Aggelos]

Brian Greene's thoughts and comments on the announcement

 

[llien]

AMD saw it coming:

 

[Vlaphor]

I'm trying to figure out how far away this is in miles, but every calculator I use just spits this out

3.23324396e+20

I'm sure a more math savvy person could get me a full number, but I just look at that and see a calculator giving up.


Also

 

[DKehoe]

 

[MetalAlien]

51 minutes... mark!

 

[synchronicity]

The anus of the universe.

 

[Aggelos]

 

[manfestival]

I mean it fits the bill with what we supposedly know about them

 

[SailorCosmos]

I'm trying to figure out how far away this is in miles, but every calculator I use just spits this out

3.23324396e+20

I'm sure a more math savvy person could get me a full number, but I just look at that and see a calculator giving up.

55,000,000,000 x 6,000,000,000,000 = 3.3 x 10^23 = 330,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away (330 sextillion miles away)

 

[triplestation]

Looking at the image too long mildly reduces sanity

 

[Virex]

Black hole Sun. Won't you come

 

[highrider]

Meh, it’s impressive how they are able to get the image, but the old Disney Black Hole was much cooler.

 

[slugbahr]

55,000,000,000 x 6,000,000,000,000 = 3.3 x 10^23 = 330,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away (330 sextillion miles away)

3.3 x 10^22 if your other numbers are right

 

[Chairman Tickles]

It's nice, but it's exactly what we expected it to look like. MEH. Like the first imagery of actual atoms. Literally spoiled 50 years ago. MEH.

 

[Tesseract]

yup, that is a black hole

we still know nothing more now than we did yesterday

bummer

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

That’s incredible.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

Thats incredible

Also I think Soto hit one last night that may have reached that Black Hole

Bryce hit one earlier that came that might have CAUSED that black hole!

 

[Helios]

 

[Musky_Cheese]

Bryce hit one earlier that came that might have CAUSED that black hole!

It wasn’t that far tho

 

[Verdanth]

A happy day to all the virgins out there.

 

[Rentahamster]

A very challenging feat to accomplish. Nice work, scientists.

 

[PSYGN]

A happy day to all the virgins out there.

Congrats

 

[#Phonepunk#]

I mean cool yay for them. A picture of a theoretical thing that may exist. Here I am with blood cancer but thank god we put millions of dollars towards photographing something nobody will ever get anywhere near seeing in the history of mankind. Science!

 

[Mihos]

It looks almost exactly like the models of relativity predicted. Einstein still crushing it.

Is this a "top down" view? Would that mean the bright spots on the bottom-right are stars or clouds of gas the black hole is feeding on?

The brighter side is the side that is spinning towards you. The circle in the center is the black holes shadow caused by the event horizon + the material/light is moving parallel to us. The actual event horizon is about 1/3rd smaller than the 'black' part of the shadow. If we were looking top down, one side wouldn't be brighter, although it isn't exactly from the side either. I think when we get the images of our own black hole it will more on edge and maybe the lighter side will be more symetrical

 

[EviLore]

Beautiful.

 

[Verdanth]

Congrats

 

[llien]

3.23324396e+20

I'm sure a more math savvy person could get me a full number, but I just look at that and see a calculator giving up.

E+20 actually means 10 ^ 20 => basically, append 20 zeros.

 

[Pejo]

My first thought, haha. This brings me extra joy because I know you had to stare at the original for a while to cut the hands out. Big ol' butthole zoomed in on your monitor.

 

[Weilthain]

I think it’s a load of shit.

 

[HarryKS]

Come on now, that's just a picture of your mom.

 

[Hissing Sid]

Ffs, now I know why I never use my phone to browse at mealtimes .. because the first time I do I’m met with a Gaf post that makes me involuntarily snort spaghetti bolognese out through my nose.

Guffaw.

 

[Aggelos]

Today it's as if we have a "Black Hole E3" of some sort

 

[lock2k]

I used to be big into astronomy when I was a kid but nowadays I just think.... everything is so big, so far away... so out of reach, so inaccessible. It makes me feel like I'm smaller than a microbe. Not a good feeling. I don't care anymore.