Scientists capture first image of a black hole!!

Scientists capture first direct image of the event horizon of a black hole!!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/world/black-hole-photo-scn/index.html?cid=web-alerts&nsid=49043479

 

Hmm looks like

Spoiler

the eye of sauron

 

That is awesome.

I'll be in my bunk.

 

It's this:



Douglas Adams knew.

 

Who knew the Eye of Sauron was an evil black hole?

 

The item imaged is 55 million years old. What must it look like today?

Wondrous science. Wondrous.

 

On a serious note, this is a big breakthrough on several levels. It is a breakthrough for what Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry can achieve. if it can take images of black holes millions of miles away, it can be used to detect other objects as well. It will also allow to study black holes and learn more about them as well as push the boundaries of our understanding of general relativity. So it should help us gain a deeper understanding of astrophysics.

 

Brian Greene gives a little background to today's big discovery:

 

amazing!!

 

*Raises eyebrow* My my.. that is a big sucker...

 

It's a big sucker. The thing is 24 billion miles in diameter. That's about 258 astronomical units (distance from the Earth to the Sun).

 

The scale of things in astronomy never ceases to absolutely blow my mind.

 

Yeah. That 24 billion is more than three times the diameter of our solar system. If the thing wasn't a black hole, light would take a day and a half to cross it.

 

About 3 times the size of V'ger!

 

The black hole in M87 is estimated at 6.5 billion solar masses so the Schwarzchild radius of its event horizon is 6.5 billion times the Schwarzchild radius of the mass of the Sun (3km) or about 20 billion km. (The Schwarzchild radius R = 2GM/c^2 scales directly with mass M. G is the universal gravitational constant and c is the speed of light.) As the black hole is rotating, one should more properly apply the Kerr metric rather than the Schwarzchild metric, which applies to non-rotating bodies. However, I don't know the rotation rate of this beast.

It will be interesting to see the imaging of Sagittarius A*, the much-less massive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy. It's estimated to be about 4 million solar masses so R would be 12 million km or about 0.08 AU.

The radius of the "shadow region" (which corresponds to the black blob) for a non-rotating black hole is 2.5 times the Schwarzchild radius. For a rotating black hole, this region is offset somewhat to the side that is rotating away from the observer, depending on the rotation rate.

ETA: If we had a much longer baseline, we could get much finer detail images. Time to build a radio observatory on the Moon? That would potentially increase the resolution at the 1.4 mm wavelength of these observations from 20 microarcseconds to about 1 microarcsecond.

 

Thankyou OP for posting this.

This is absolutely fantastic news. Saw this link on facebook and some of the bell ends in the comments section...... Ugh.

But bloody fantastic news

 

We had trouble getting the collected data from Antarctica, because you have to wait months to fly a plane out during winter.
You cannot download so much data over the internet.
I imagine it would be even harder from the moon by a lot.

Edit: regarding Sagitarrius A*, I captured this from the YT Channel Veritasium. The right image shows our Milky Way black hole.
https://imgur.com/gallery/1zRKqSQ

 

Nope. Use a communications maser or laser. There's almost nothing except vacuum between the Earth and the Moon. We've been bouncing lasers off the reflectors on the Moon for 50 years. We received live TV images from the Moon just as long ago.

 

What is the bandwidth of that?