The impossible picture

[ChristineM]

The first ever photograph of black hole was published on Space.com yesterday

Historic 1st Photo of a Black Hole Named Science Breakthrough of 2019 | Space

 

[icehorse]

astronomers amaze me

 

[sun rise]

This is a great accomplishment.

 

[Nakosis]

Kind of blurry.

 

[ChristineM]

Kind of blurry.

That can happen with zoom lenses when the subject is over 53 million light years away and black on a black background

 

[dybmh]

It looks delicious.. Captivating even... Like a glazed doughnut glowing with potential (energy).

 

[columbus]

That can happen with zoom lenses when the subject is over 53 million light years away and black on a black background

What I don't understand is why there's a dark spot in the middle of the picture. Wouldn't a black hole be at the center of a sphere of the glowy stuff, completely surrounded by it?
How could anybody take a picture that includes a black hole?

Oh well. I suppose I'll just take the same answer I got from my religious teachers decades ago. "It's a mystery, son."
Tom

 

[Subduction Zone]

It came out in April but it is still astounding.

 

[Subduction Zone]

What I don't understand is why there's a dark spot in the middle of the picture. Wouldn't a black hole be at the center of a sphere of the glowy stuff, completely surrounded by it?
How could anybody take a picture that includes a black hole?

Oh well. I suppose I'll just take the same answer I got from my religious teachers decades ago. "It's a mystery, son."
Tom

You can get a lot more information from this article:

"Eureka! Black Hole Photographed for 1st Time | Space


What I found rather amazing in the article is that it was faster to transfer the data by putting it on a truck and driving it rather than sending it over the internet:


"There's no way that we can transfer this data through the internet," EHT project scientist Dimitrios Psaltis, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said at the SXSW event. "So, what we actually do is, we take our hard drives and we FedEx them from place to place. This is much faster than any cable that you can ever find."

They were working with petabits of data. My desktop has a capacity of a terabyte. Think of the date from one thousand full desktops being shipped across the country. UPS for the win!

 

[ChristineM]

What I don't understand is why there's a dark spot in the middle of the picture. Wouldn't a black hole be at the center of a sphere of the glowy stuff, completely surrounded by it?
How could anybody take a picture that includes a black hole?

Oh well. I suppose I'll just take the same answer I got from my religious teachers decades ago. "It's a mystery, son."
Tom

Think Saturn, the black hole spins, the accretion disk is dragged out along the rotation.

 

[amorphous_constellation]

It looks ominous and kind of angry

 

[wandering peacefully]

Eye of Sauron...

 

[Howard Is]

The end of Snoop Dog’s blunt.

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

So. Why call it a "black hole" and not just a "hole"?

Anyone who thinks astrophysicists lack a sense of humor? Should study the names of properties of quantum-level particles.

I've seen references to a "white hole" but only in literature, and I have no idea what that could be.

Cool photograph.

They were working with petabits of data. My desktop has a capacity of a terabyte. Think of the date from one thousand full desktops being shipped across the country. UPS for the win!

"petabits". That's a number that is impossible to really get a grasp of, in the normal sense of the word. Staggering, really-- but still? Smaller than the number of visible (telescope-visible) stars in the Universe...

 

[wandering peacefully]

Eye of Sauron...

I can handle a lot of the incredible ideas and discoveries about our universe. There is just no way I can fathom black holes! Even though they are a now proven fact? What the heck goes on in a black hole and what comes out the other side? Black holes rock. Just picture our earth when it eventually gets sucked in. Space and the universe are so totally amazing.