Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole 77
Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."
Those freakin' scientists (Score:3, Informative)
Re:pft yeah right - 10 billion light years away (Score:3, Informative)
Several responses to your post:
"...wait for 10 billion years...": no, whatever happened seems to have happened some 10 billion years _ago_.
"...convergence of fake radiation...": although the 10-billion-year-old events are still quite open to argument, the astronomers observed _real_ radiation from them.
"...fricken verifiable data closer to earth...": any slashdotter can tell you that you'll get your nearby black hole data just a few dozen milliseconds after the LHC starts working.
Re:Why an Einstein Cross? (Score:4, Informative)
Some gravitational lensing configurations do, in fact, produce a ring [wikipedia.org]. As you might expect, though, such perfect alignment is pretty rare, and you usually get partial arcs or smeared out blobs.
I'm not knowledgeable about the exact reason for the cross configuration is, but the unusual effects of gravitational lensing are often due to the fact that the lens (a massive galaxy, in most cases) isn't a perfect point source, so the optical effects are somewhat surprising.