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First ever black hole image revealed

I hate the movie but The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne is a very good book. It explains the science of the black hole in a way that's very easy to understand. The movie was the first time a black hole was rendered in such detail and today's images prove it was accurate.
 

Grinchy

Banned
They are claiming this black hole is spherical, which is the first clue that this is all a huge lie. Black holes are definitely flat. I'm hereby founding the Flat Hole Society.
 

Ellis

Member
That hole will be my final resting place. I can feel it.

It Looks beautiful. The Universe will never fail to blow my mind.

Just fucking awesome.
 
6D6BCC64-1CC7-45D6-A7E8-872CD4CBB157.jpeg

Oh, fuck you. You stole my goatse joke >:O
 

Thurible

Member
That hole will be my final resting place. I can feel it.

It Looks beautiful. The Universe will never fail to blow my mind.

Just fucking awesome.
Your first comment reminds me of a famous japanese horror manga about an earthquake uncovering strange unnatural human shaped holes on cliffsides. Certain people are then drawn to the holes and they get trapped inside of them, being spaghettified on the process of going to the other side of the mountain.

Anyway, blackholes are pretty dang cool! We have such an incredible universe that we reside in don't we? Have you ever heard of whiteholes? They are a theoritical antithesis to blackholes. Instead of taking and compressing all matter that enters its event horizon, it would expel matter.

I heard if someone managed to get into a black hole's event horizon, they wpuld leave an after image of themselves, I'm not completely sure if that is true though.
 
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!
It’s not like there isn’t thousands of people in research and treatment for cancer.
 
Why is the accretion disk not a sphere, if the black hole is sphere shaped? I honestly don't get it. I get that spinning something around created a disk, but why doesn't the insane mass pull matter in the spherical shape of the black hole itself and create an accretion "shell" around it?
 

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Why is the accretion disk not a sphere, if the black hole is sphere shaped? I honestly don't get it. I get that spinning something around created a disk, but why doesn't the insane mass pull matter in the spherical shape of the black hole itself and create an accretion "shell" around it?

https://astronomy.stackexchange.com...hy-are-they-disk-shaped-rather-than-spherical

There's two different effects here, and they're both related to viscuous forces in the accreting matter.

First, if the infalling matter has some nonzero angular momentum vector LL, then consider a plane perpendicular to this vector. Due to its conservation, we can't get rid of rotation along this plane, but the component of angular momentum orthogonal to the plane is zero. As the accreting matter heats up and radiates away energy, that energy is taken from the gravitational potential, which is lessened by bringing the matter particles closer together. Thus, such interactions tend to flatten the matter into the plane orthogonal to its angular momentum.

But there's something more that happens for rotating black holes, as a combination of its gravitomagnetic field and viscous forces in the matter, that drives the matter to the plane of the black hole's rotation, regardless of its initial angular momentum. This is called the Bardeen–Petterson effect [1]:

In an accretion disk, viscosity causes each ring of gas to spiral inward toward the hole with a radial speed |ur|≪(orbital velocity)=(M/r)1/2|ur|≪(orbital velocity)=(M/r)1/2. If this were the only effect of viscosity, the warping of the disk would consist of a differential precession. Successive rings, each of smaller radius than the preceding, would have interacting longer with the [gravitomagnetic] field and thus would have precessed through successively larger angles... . As a result the disk would be radially twisted, but it would not be driven into the equatorial plane. However, the precession changes the disk's shear σjkσjk and thus changes the viscous forces; and these altered forces drive the disk toward the equatorial plane of the black hole.

This is only significant closer to the black hole, at r≲100Mr≲100M. At larger radii, the disk shape is due to the direction of the angular momentum of the matter instead.
 

Cybrwzrd

Banned
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?

Yeah, it likely is angled right that the rotational forces of the black hole itself is facing us from an angle that lets us see the accretion disk. But it isn’t a 2D object, just the mass(gravity) of all the things orbiting it are keeping things on a relatively flat plane. If that makes sense.

And EviLore EviLore ’s explaination is even better than that. Tho I wouldn’t think the gravitional force of a black hole at a sufficient distance would work much different than a star. The effect of a black hole shouldn’t be that much different fundamentally than that of a star on its planets, right? Unless they cross into the event horizon or maybe the singularity, that is.
 
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lol i guess there are no more needed.

of course this image of a blurry spot was worth millions and dollars and as many lives.
Not to be insensitive, but exploration and discover like this lead to many, many things on a more humanitarian level in the future. I get that doesn't do shit for those in need at the moment, but we do need organizations such at this working toward large, far reaching scale efforts. Their technologies trickle down.
 
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lol i guess there are no more needed.

of course this image of a blurry spot was worth millions and dollars and as many lives.
What? Cancer is one of the biggest topics in the medical field and one of the most studied. There are people who are dedicating their entire lives to it. Just because one field of science exist doesn’t mean other should not exist. The budget of NASA and astronomy is laughably small compared to other sectors of the government and science.
 

MetalAlien

Banned
lol i guess there are no more needed.

of course this image of a blurry spot was worth millions and dollars and as many lives.
This is like seeing the earth from space for the first time. Or the first time man flew in a hot air balloon and saw the curve of the earth. Knowing something is there is not the same as seeing. Medicine is a buisness anyway. If they found the cure for anything that person would mysteriously disappear.
 
I’m truly sorry for anyone who had to suffer the diagnosis of cancer but there are millions of dollars in research into the topic and passionate people who care about the lives of others.
 
This is like seeing the earth from space for the first time. Or the first time man flew in a hot air balloon and saw the curve of the earth. Knowing something is there is not the same as seeing. Medicine is a buisness anyway. If they found the cure for anything that person would mysteriously disappear.
Not true, what about all of the ground breaking vaccines developed just over the course of this century. I’m not saying the medical field doesn’t fuck us with $$$ but that is simply not true
 

MetalAlien

Banned
Not true, what about all of the ground breaking vaccines developed just over the course of this century. I’m not saying the medical field doesn’t fuck us with $$$ but that is simply not true
Treatments we get in droves, cures not so much... this will derail the thread so fast I concede!!
 
Treatments we get in droves, cures not so much... this will derail the thread so fast I concede!!
That is because a cure is hard to develop and takes ALOT of time and advancement in technology. Further more, it is simply the nature of biology that micro organisms adapt to our antibiotics over time, some develope VERY fast like HIV for example. Ok I’ll end it there but I had to say that.
 

Cybrwzrd

Banned
In all seriousness, a new Babymetal album was announced this month, the month of the Fox god, and now we have pictures of this black hole to go along with it. Very subtle marketing Kitsune-sama.

 
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