Hubble Directly Images Disc Around a Black Hole 76
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the HST site:
"A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The incredible precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc's size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc."
We've come a long way... (Score:4, Insightful)
We've come a long way since we first gazed at the stars and wondered...
Hubble Space Telescope (Score:5, Insightful)
Blowing your mind since 1990
Best damn use of NASA funds, since the Moon landing.
Brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)
Using stars between us and the black hole as a lens to magnify the viewing target? That seems like the astronomer's equivalent of a ninja move. Brilliant.
We're sure getting a lot of use out of Hubble. Weren't we planning on decommissioning it at some point in time? I'm glad we didn't.
Albert Einstein, bad-ass (Score:4, Insightful)
And to think he figured this stuff out around 100 years ago...
Hubble: White Elephant MY ASS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving the finger to naysayers, budget cutters and luddite schmucks for 20+ years (and going). Not to mention some absolutely MIND-BLOWING interstellar photography.
Definitely not bad for a girl with glasses.
Re:Albert Einstein, bad-ass (Score:4, Insightful)
And to think he figured this stuff out around 100 years ago...
About 8 years ago I was using the Deep Field View [hubblesite.org] for my desktop wallpaper - there's a lot of gravitational lensing going on in there, if you look carefully. Ol' Albert was a pretty sharp one, a little sad he didn't live to see these sorts of images - I'm certain he'd be so stoked that he'd pump his fist and shout, "Yesssss!"
In the spirit of science I'll toast to his memory with a pint when I gets home tonight.
Re:Hubble Space Telescope (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say the mars rovers were a better bang for the buck, but hubble is a close second even with all the retrofits.
I still find it a shame that the last shuttle mission wasn't a trip to the hubble to bring it home. just like the shuttle were designed to do.
Other than for it to go into a museum, what would be the benefit of spending millions of dollars bringing 20-year-old technology back to earth (rather than letting it spend another 10 years in space)? Sure you can say stuff like "to see what the effects of 20 years in 0-gravity were" but we have other examples.