First ever black hole image

[Bigun]

Wow!


First ever black hole image released - BBC News

 

[adason]

Homer was right!

 

[mbrennwa]

Looks like a tube amp.

 

[TNT]

Media and scientist get popular and describe:

- the hole as a "shadow" - is that a good/accurate description really?
- ... there is now a photo of... really... they created an image out of radio wave receptions.. public will feel cheated once they understand.

Big think for sure! But I think that the gravitational waves where bigger.

//

 

[NicMac]

.. public will feel cheated once they understand.

Once they understand what? The relativity theory?

 

[kevinahcc20]

Another confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity...the patent clerk who thought about the implications of the speed of light being invariant to the peculiar motion of an observer. Perhaps the most revolutionary thinking in the history of science.

 

[TNT]

Once they understand what? The relativity theory?

That it is not a photo - i.e. it is not an image captured from visible light. So it has not been *seen* yet.

//

 

[NicMac]

It is an image.
How would you present your billion dollar research to the public? Raw data?
Photos of black holes are inherently rather boring to look at

 

[Galu]

Disney got the image pretty much right 40 years ago!

 

[Bigun]

The move Interstellar captured a lot of people's imagination.

 

[scott wurcer]

That it is not a photo - i.e. it is not an image captured from visible light. So it has not been *seen* yet.

//

Narrow definition, radio astronomers have been constructing "images" at radio frequencies for decades. The electromagnetic spectrum is a lot more than visible light.

 

[JMFahey]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ that.

The point being that if it captures radio waves, it will also capture light, visible or invisible ... which is also a "radio wave".

Include X Rays too.

 

[Cal Weldon]

50 million light years away? I wonder what that black hole is up to these days?

Is that like 3^30 years since that image got to us in real years.

Sigh, seems like only yesterday.

 

[rayma]

That it is not a photo - i.e. it is not an image captured from visible light.
So it has not been seen yet.

Research telescopes (including Hubble) use CCDs, not eyepieces or cameras.
There will never be a photo of this.

 

[Bigun]

Never ? what is needed is a very long baseline telescope in order to get enough resolving power - which means retaining phase information about the signal photons across thousands of km. Just because we can't do that today with visible photons doesn't rule it out. It's a matter of engineering and $. Maybe not in our lifetimes though.

 

[planet10]

There is a huge amount of information in the slim ring of plasma just before the event horizon. Researchers have been looking at this for 2 yrs (?) now and they have presented a still in time, but the raw data is really a movie. Expect more telescopes to join in and computing sophistication will improve th eresolution of the captured image.

This black hole is 50 million light years away and huge. They are also trying to image the black hole in the centre of our galaxy which is much smaller but also a lot closer (26k light years).

What this brings to gravational theory & potentially the unification with quantum physics will not be told for many years if not decades.

dave

 

[Bigun]

The challenge with imaging our local blackhole is that it's obscured by dust and other starts etc.

 

[planet10]

Indeed.

dave

 

[harum]

The question is why it looks like a donut if it is surrounded by gas? Just because it is a projection to 2D or because image processing, like deconvolution, may emphasize (or in worst cases even create) the edges?

 

[rayma]

Never ? what is needed is a very long baseline telescope in order to get enough resolving power - which means retaining phase information about the signal photons across thousands of km. Just because we can't do that today with visible photons doesn't rule it out. It's a matter of engineering and $. Maybe not in our lifetimes though.

This is done optically now with distributed telescopes for better resolution.
Optical aperture synthesis with electronically connected telescopes | Nature Communications