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Scientists capture first image of a black hole!!

Hmm looks like

190410090959-01-black-hole-event-horizon-telescope-exlarge-169.jpg

the eye of sauron
 
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:

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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 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.
 
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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
 
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.
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
 
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I imagine it would be even harder from the moon by a lot.
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.
 
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