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Space Science

Black Hole Picture Captured For First Time in Space 'Breakthrough' (theguardian.com) 322

Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself -- a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape -- is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.

The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within.
A video stream of the press conference.
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Black Hole Picture Captured For First Time in Space 'Breakthrough'

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  • Article or it didn't happen? No source article?

  • Bravo! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:09AM (#58414794)

    I hope they keep on working....after all black holes are among the very few mysteries left to figure out and a possible source of development of "new physics". I was rather crushed that the LHC did not find anything new....confirming the Higgs was great but expected....I was hoping for new mysteries that might lead to something Sci-Fi like such as teleportation or FTL travel. Ahhh, reality is a harsh mistress!

    • by Sique ( 173459 )
      You could say that the Standard Model predicted it, both the Higgs Boson and the non-discovery of anything else. For the next few orders of magnitude of Energy, there is nothing but recombinations of the known particles.

      It would have been very interesting if for instance, the Higgs Boson also comes in generations like the leptons, or if we had something like a strange Higgs and a top Higgs.

    • Re:Bravo! (Score:5, Informative)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @12:38PM (#58416208) Journal

      Oh, there's no lack of mysteries. There's still no data at all on what dark matter actually is, beyond "matter, cold, interacts weakly". Dark energy is just as mysterious. Heck, even inflation, which has been a primary focus of cosmology for over a decade, is merely a well-studied mystery.

    • If you're really interested in science, you should check out the work of these folks:

      Viktor Shauberger [youtube.com].
      Walter Russell [youtube.com]
      Alan Watts [youtube.com] (just a link to a youtube search of his name)
      Then finish it all off with Patanjali [youtube.com]

      I'm certain that science will eventually understand how these men did what they did. But at that point, "science" will be more about the internal reality, and less about the external world.

  • by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt@ner[ ]at.com ['dfl' in gap]> on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:12AM (#58414802) Journal

    ... to the argumentative position of "How can we know they exist if we can't see them?"

    Thank you, science... hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.

    • by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:33AM (#58414958) Homepage Journal

      hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.

      Yes, the era of people not knowing how to infer has just ended. Congrats on the new era's first post! That was exquisite timing; I'm jealous.

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )

        I never said that... it's just that this argument is one that I've seen used a lot by people who doubted the existence of black holes, and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.

        I'm sure it won't stop them from coming up with some other reason to doubt it, but this is one I've heard *repeatedly*, from literally every single person I've ever met who didn't think they existed.

        • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @10:30AM (#58415356)

          and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.

          Oh you sweet summer child.

          If knowledge were sufficient to remove idiocy, we'd have been rid of it centuries ago. The only thing more frustrating than arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they cannot use basic reason, is arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they ignore all evidence.

  • Today I learned... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:18AM (#58414848) Journal
    There is a 10 meter telescope at the South Pole [wikipedia.org] that has been in operation since 2007.
  • It's not easy (Score:4, Informative)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:43AM (#58415022)

    I can't even get a decent photo of my black cat.

  • by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @10:00AM (#58415158) Homepage Journal

    Veritasium did an excellent summary of how to understand and interpret what you're seeing in the image. Before the image was actually posted, he drew what all the models were anticipating, and you can see a lot of the features he spoke about in the actual image.

    YouTube [youtube.com]

    When I saw the movie Interstellar, their image of a black hole seemed really hokey, but there's a reason for the way they drew it and it seems like parts of their conceptualization holds up fairly well.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @10:17AM (#58415272)

      The black hole from Interstellar is actually NOT a "concept drawing", it was rendered by a relativistic ray tracing software. There is even a refereed paper in a scientific journal about the code (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001). Only the relativistic color and brightness shift of the disc were left out because they were deemed too confusing for the movie audience.

    • I had been wondering, why it was that we seemed to be so lucky as to be looking exactly above the accretion disc... watching the video helped to understand why the angle didn't matter so much.

  • Discovery! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Zorro ( 15797 )

    This is where all the Tax Money goes.

    • Re:Discovery! (Score:4, Informative)

      by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @01:52PM (#58416852) Journal

      This is where all the Tax Money goes.

      I can't tell if you're trolling or not. This entire endeavor was about $50-60 million, about half of which was directly funded by the NSF (tax money). By comparison, just one F-35 fighter jet is about $100 million.

  • by pointbeing ( 701902 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @10:16AM (#58415260)

    After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)

    • After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)

      The Register [theregister.co.uk] could not resist in their reporting and made that joke for you.

    • I'm still waiting for a group of shitlord astronomers to officially name a Goatse Nebula and a Goatse Galaxy.

      And taking this train of thought further, I propose that 46 Capricorni be declared Goat C (considering the Capricorn constellation can be called the Goat.)

  • Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc DOT famine AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @10:40AM (#58415434) Journal

    I'm truly in awe at this. I just looked at a picture of the black hole in the center of M87. It is mindblowingly far away, and one of the most exotic things in the universe.

    I honestly never thought that we'd do something like this in my lifetime.

    100 years ago we didn't know that black holes existed. In essentially one human lifetime we went from not knowing something existed to building a planet-sized telescope to look at it. It is so far away that while we can put numbers on it, it's still just an abstraction because we can't really understand the scale of what we're dealing with.

    Think of how far 1000 miles or 1000 km really is. Imagine driving that. Imagine walking that. Now slap 11 zeros onto that. No, not "imagine it 11 times", 11 orders of magnitude larger. Imagine that 1000 miles/km is the width of a human hair. Slice the earth and half and lay them down to span the diameter of the earth. That's ballpark the scale that we're talking about. Imagine how many hairs it would take to span the diameter of the earth. It's an unfathomable number. That's how many times 1000 miles away this thing is.

    When the light left the accretion disk around this black hole, the K-T extinction event was relatively recent history.

    And with SpaceX seriously cutting launch costs, and potentially being able to reliably reach past the moon's orbit, we'll likely have telescopes with an effective resolution larger than the earth in the not-too-distant future, and we'll be able to image this and other things in even higher resolution.

    Holy shit are we an incredible species.

    • And if you can not drive all the way to M87 without stopping for refueling, the battery cars are no good. All that talk about carbon emissions, and Elon is still using chemical burning rockets! If he is so smart why didn't he design an electric rocket, eh? He sneaked an electric car into orbit riding on the same old fossil fuel powered rocket, and all his fans are going ga-ga over it fooled into thinking that spaceman roadster got up there on its own electric charge. geez.
  • " ... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

  • FTFA "The success of the project hinged on clear skies on several continents simultaneously and exquisite coordination between the eight far-flung teams."

    Why are clear skies a requirement of a radio telescope? Or is this just the popular press version of a science story?

    • Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.

      Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.

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