Scientists Reveal 1st Image Ever Made Of A Black Hole
Associated Press,
by
Staff
Original Article
Posted By: JoniTx,
4/10/2019 1:36:04 PM
Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting a fiery orange and black ring of gravity-twisted light swirling around the edge of the abyss. Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers captured a picture of the hot, shadowy lip of a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades. It is along this edge that light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Nevadadad46 4/10/2019 1:43:54 PM (No. 29484)
Funny, looks nothing like Maxine Waters´ head.
12 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
valinva 4/10/2019 1:46:08 PM (No. 29492)
Not true. I´ve seen pictures of Democrat giveaway programs.
12 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
jjs 4/10/2019 1:46:55 PM (No. 29478)
I though it looks like our federal government.
5 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
TexaTucky 4/10/2019 1:48:08 PM (No. 29483)
Was she wearin´ her triple-crown-weave, a red dress, and hoggin´ the camera?
6 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
droopydog 4/10/2019 1:49:46 PM (No. 29491)
Speaking of black holes, Don Lemon once asked an aviation expert if the missing Malaysian airliner might have been sucked into one...no kidding...video is just a web search away.
11 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
kono 4/10/2019 3:11:22 PM (No. 29485)
What´s been accomplished is not quite what the news is hyping in their somewhat-infantile reporting on this. But it´s still a breakthrough of sorts and the teams collaborating in the ambitious EHT project deserve mega-kudos.
5 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Highlander 4/10/2019 3:27:40 PM (No. 29488)
Not terribly impressive. It looks like a cosmic donut.
71 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 4/10/2019 3:53:40 PM (No. 29480)
Dumb question, but what exactly is a black hole? Its high gravity enables it to suck in matter. What effect does a black hole have on energy?
7 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
whyyeseyec 4/10/2019 4:23:28 PM (No. 29476)
I just can´t accept that anything built by man can see roughly 320 million trillion miles from earth. How is that possible?
2 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
padiva 4/10/2019 4:34:53 PM (No. 29479)
So that´s where HRC put the deleted emails.
No, really, how soon before the liberals think we should change our life styles so they can control it?
Gd is sovereign....not self-elevated people.
2 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 4/10/2019 5:11:11 PM (No. 29475)
Yes, #6, and it is apparent that Lemon is an exceptionally stupid person.
3 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
toddh 4/10/2019 5:32:37 PM (No. 29489)
#9 - Light has a finite speed (~186,000 miles per second), and a black hole´s escape velocity is higher than that, so light can´t get out. Einstein showed that the speed of light is the universe´s speed limit, so if light can´t escape, nothing else can.*
*Until by some quantum improbability a particle/antiparticle pair happens, and one of them is uncertainly outside the black hole and gets away, this is Hawking radiation and it made him famous. Don´t ask me about black holes and hair. Hairy black holes worry me.
((I had a bit about Schwarzschild but it´s more than 300 words.))
4 people like this.
Agree with #7. Kudos to the scientists.
#9 - Albert Einstein invented the theory of Relativity, which states that space (length, width, depth) and time are not 4 separate things, but a single thing - space-time. Furthermore, space-time "bends" in the presence of matter. The more matter, the more "bending".
You asked about mass and energy. The theory of Relativity also states that they are equivalent (the same thing). This is the famous E=mc2 equation behind the atomic bomb.
Back to astronomy. As more and more mass clumps together in stars, sometimes they get so big they explode. The biggest exploding stars leave behind a core where the "bending" is so extreme that no light can escape and any light going in can ever come out, hence, the black appearance.
It was then discovered that every galaxy has a GIGANTIC black hole at its center. The conference today released the first picture of such a supermassive black hole in human history.
2 people like this.
#10 - Before this announcement, I didn´t think this was possible either.
However, a group of very smart astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists figure out a way to build a "virtual telescope" as big as the whole Earth, by linking several telescopes around the world of different types and putting them on a common "clock".
Bottom line, very sensitive sensors, very fast computers, and very very smart people were able to make a "virtual telescope" to make that picture.
3 people like this.
#8 - yes, it is kind of fuzzy-looking.
However, an old Russian saying about a dancing bear applies here:
"The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all."
The team that created this picture is still collecting data and is adding more observatories to their network, so we can expect gradual improvements to the picture.
But the clarity, even at this stage, is sufficient to prove Einstein´s equations still work around the most deformed space that we know of (mass bends space) and provide several tantalizing hints for connecting gravity to quantum mechanics (the biggest problem in physics since the 1930s).
3 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
Rumblehog 4/10/2019 6:03:46 PM (No. 29486)
Michelle? Oprah? Whoopie? Is that you?
3 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Mother of AL 4/10/2019 6:32:31 PM (No. 29477)
We live in Richland WA, just about 10 miles south of the Hanford reservation, where one of the LIGO facilities is located. When this was discovered it made big news here. They offered tours to the public regarding the disoverery. It was incredibly interesting and one of the PhD’s who worked there gave a lecture afterwards. My husband is a radiologist who works with physics all day and he was interested so it was fantastic. LIGO offers public tours every month. So I have seen the LIGO and loved it.
3 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
DVC 4/11/2019 4:52:07 AM (No. 29490)
If you are curious about how this was done, here is an extremely simplified explanation by one of the scientists who worked on this project, Katie Bouman, from a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs
I once did an inadvertant demonstration of this resolution limit thing with two of my optically best telescopes.
I was observing Jupiter on a night with particularly good seeing, using an 8" Newtonian reflector, and a 3" refractor. I have best quality Tele Vue eyepieces. In the 8" scope, I spotted the perfectly black, perfectly circular shadow of a moon on the cloud tops, a clear, but quite tiny black circle, moving across the face. I tried to
see it in the exceptionally high quality 3" scope, using the same exact eyepiece. No matter how much I tweaked the focus, the moon shadow was just NOT THERE, below the resolution limit of the 3" scope, but not the 8" scope. I tried two other eyepieces, and each could see the shadow in the 8" but not in the 3". This is a practical example of her resolution equation, the diffraction limit, in my case for visible light.
0 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
DVC 4/11/2019 5:00:56 AM (No. 29493)
Oh, and as a related comment. Some people believe that spy satellites can photograph faces and license plates from space, and identify cars and people. Is it possible?
A former Hughes spy satellite engineer friend, when asked if this was possible, pulled up the diffraction limit resolution equation. Given that the largest mirror possible to orbit as one piece is would be as big as the Space Shuttle Bay (in those days), it was possible to calculate that the smallest object that could be resolved was about 6", for a pixel, effectively. So, a face with 6" pixels is not a face, and a license plate with 6" pixels has no resolvable numbers. You could see a 1 pixel by 2 pixel (approx) blob, but that is all, for a license plate. About 4 pixels for a face....no ID there.
You need an assembled, much larger scope to get the ~1/2" pixel resolution needed for even a fuzzy image.
0 people like this.
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