Nearby Galaxy's Giant Black Hole Is Real, 'Shadow' Image Confirms (science.org) 30
"A familiar shadow looms in a fresh image of the heart of the nearby galaxy M87," reports Science magazine.
"It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun." But compared with a previous image from the network of radio dishes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the new one reveals a subtle shift in the bright ring surrounding the shadow, which could provide clues to how gases churn around the black hole. "We can see that shift now," says team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. "We can start to use that." The new detail has also whetted astronomers' desire for a proposed expansion of the EHT, which would deliver even sharper images of distant black holes.
The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 and named as Science's Breakthrough of the Year. The dark center of the image is the same size as in the original image, confirming that the image depicts physical reality and is not an artifact. "It tells us it wasn't a fluke," says Martin Hardcastle, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire who was not involved in the study. The black hole's mass would not have grown appreciably in 1 year, so the comparison also supports the idea that a black hole's size is determined by its mass alone. In the new image, however, the brightest part of a ring surrounding the black hole has shifted counterclockwise by about 30 degrees.
That could be because of random churning in the disk of material that swirls around the black hole's equator. It could also be associated with fluctuations in one of the jets launched from the black hole's poles — a sign that the jet isn't aligned with the black hole's spin axis, but precesses around it like a wobbling top. That would be "kind of exciting," Markoff says. "The only way to know is to keep taking pictures...."
[T]he team wants to add more telescopes to the network, which would further sharpen its images and enable it to see black holes in more distant galaxies.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.
"It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun." But compared with a previous image from the network of radio dishes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the new one reveals a subtle shift in the bright ring surrounding the shadow, which could provide clues to how gases churn around the black hole. "We can see that shift now," says team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. "We can start to use that." The new detail has also whetted astronomers' desire for a proposed expansion of the EHT, which would deliver even sharper images of distant black holes.
The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 and named as Science's Breakthrough of the Year. The dark center of the image is the same size as in the original image, confirming that the image depicts physical reality and is not an artifact. "It tells us it wasn't a fluke," says Martin Hardcastle, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire who was not involved in the study. The black hole's mass would not have grown appreciably in 1 year, so the comparison also supports the idea that a black hole's size is determined by its mass alone. In the new image, however, the brightest part of a ring surrounding the black hole has shifted counterclockwise by about 30 degrees.
That could be because of random churning in the disk of material that swirls around the black hole's equator. It could also be associated with fluctuations in one of the jets launched from the black hole's poles — a sign that the jet isn't aligned with the black hole's spin axis, but precesses around it like a wobbling top. That would be "kind of exciting," Markoff says. "The only way to know is to keep taking pictures...."
[T]he team wants to add more telescopes to the network, which would further sharpen its images and enable it to see black holes in more distant galaxies.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.
What kind of crappy reporting is this? (Score:2)
Light cannot escape from any "black hole" whether large or small. That is the very definition.
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I don't understand what you're getting at. The picture is of the accretion disk and photon rings around the black hole, with a big empty space in the middle where the actual black hole is.
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""It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape", like this was something special. It is not. Or at least not on this level.
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Right; that's their awkward way of saying "the second image confirms we actually saw a black hole, rather than a bug in our code, because it has changed in exactly the way a real black hole would over that time".
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Hmm. Makes some sense, I guess.
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Why let these supposedly impartial scientists dismiss all concerns with an impassioned handwave? Are we seeing how science is really just social consensus? Why would an incoming jet change position by 30% in a short time? What is causing the jet, where is it coming from, why is it a jet and not a more entropic accretion, etc., etc.? Why are they focussing on a blurry picture heavily annotated in which they could easily be imposing a pure math model on noise?
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Is the assumption that I believe in God just as wacky as the assumptions you're using to derive your 30% clockwise fantasy?
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So all you've got is "our assumptions are more popular"? In the days of epicycles, would you be attacking Aristarchus of Samos? Would you walk away from Galileo's cannon ball drops still denying that heavier things fall faster, because, look, all these aqueducts stand up, and they were built using the assumption that heavier things fall faster, so how can you deny experimental evidence? When Semmelweis whined about washing hands, would you be hard at work trolling everyone with "what you can't see obviously
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Did I miss the part where they predicted the 30% offset white light?
Are you perchance confusing your mathematical model with actual reality?
What are the error bars on their predictions? Do they imply by omitting them that they are so small as to be insignificant, when, intellectually honestly, they are on the order of (at least) plus-or-minus 30% given that unpredicted (correct me if I am wrong!) offset?
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Are you projecting?
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""It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape", like this was something special. It is not. Or at least not on this level.
That's not bad reporting, it's ordinary decent reporting with the first two sentences of the article:
A familiar shadow looms in a fresh image of the heart of the nearby galaxy M87. It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Those two sentences tell us:
a) Where (a nearby galaxy)
b) How they detected it (a shadow in the middle of the image)
c) The definition of a black hole (as some people
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Ah, when the cynicism gets so strong that a black hole is nothing special, just your run of the mill gravitational sinkhole, maybe a bit stronger. Yawn.
Data is from 2018 (Score:1)
2. Why didn't the "Editors" think that was worth mentioning?
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Less than five years really, from the end of the EHT observing campaign at the end of April 2018. The paper was submitted for publication in early September 2023, and the data processing was finished long before that to draft a 66 page paper with about 200 authors from all over the world. I expect simply writing the paper in its various drafts could have taken a full year or even more.
The first EHT image took two years to prepare, and was a bit like a dry run, shaking down the whole very complex system, and
Re: Data is from 2018 (Score:1)
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1. Processing telescope data is easy, I'll bet you could could do it in an afternoon.
2. From the summary: "The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 ". 2024 - 2019 = 5 years but the data was collected before that..
Re: Data is from 2018 (Score:1)
2. You didn't answer the question asked.
Conclusion: Idiot.
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How long did it take them to find the right way to cherry-pick the data to sort-of match their model (while handwaving away the 30% intake jet change, which apparently they couldn't find a way to sweep under the carpet)?
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Do you remember in Cargo Cult Science where Feynman describes how Very Serious Scientists kept replicating Millikan's error in subsequent oil drop experiments for decades, because of blind hero-worship? Isn't science really just as social as every other human activity? Are your emotional trolls proof that the impartiality of science is a just-so story?
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