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posted by takyon on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the donut-of-doom dept.

Submitted via IRC for boru

Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein's general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory.

[...] This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

Also at Ars Technica.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:22PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:22PM (#827678) Journal

    No, we haven't always known that Black Holes exist. We've *suspected* that they exist since Laplace (though that naturally wasn't an Einsteinian black hole, but merely a star that was heavy enough to pull light into orbit around it). Even now there could be arguments. This is consistent with a Black Hole, but we can't prove that it's one in other than the Laplacian sense. It could be a star made out of quarkium (i.e., one heavy enough that neutrons aren't able to withstand further compression, so they are squeezed tightly enough to dissolve freeing their component quarks).

    P.S.: This is a GUESS on my part. Perhaps they have actually measured a Schwarzschild horizon. But I doubt it. I think they've just detected something consistent with what current theory says a black hole would show where other analysis says something heavy enough to be a black hole is. So it's important to astrophysicists, astronomers, etc. but doesn't really test any current theories. (Well, it counts as confirmation, but only in the sense that it agrees with what was already generally accepted as true.)

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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:40PM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:40PM (#827873) Homepage

    "known" was in quotes for a reason.

    Pretty much, I believe the entire depiction of the black hole confirms exactly with the Schwarzchild parameters we would expect. There's a video on Youtube pre- the revelation which shows what they'd expect and the radii involved. The press are excited because it's a photo. The scientists are excited because it matches standard predictions and contains multiple things they can measure against the Schwarzchild radius. If they match (which is literally a two-second pixel measure), then an awful lot of science is confirmed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&disable_polymer=true [youtube.com]

    For a simple image analysis it "confirms" an awful lot that was "known" in a single glance, as well as provides metrics that can *prove* (without quotes) that it matches expected science.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:35PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:35PM (#828096) Journal

      Yes. It certainly narrows the plausible alternatives. And it (so far) matches expected predictions. But there's a whole lot of assumptions involved in interpreting the data, and the resolution isn't that good. (Well, it would have been foolish to expect better, but still, ...)

      So, AFAIKT, it's consistent with a black hole. But I think that there are still alternatives. (OTOH, I'm no specialist in that area. But I *do* know how PR types oversimplify science reporting, and turn estimates of probability into statements of certainty. And this applies to flacks working for NASA nearly as much as to anyone else. [Well, there are some I don't trust that much. The "oversimplifiers" are, I think, trying to avoid confusing or boring their audience.])

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @02:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @02:21PM (#828601)

    The concerns you raise apply to the entirety of astronomy. We can't "prove" that any of the stuff we see in skies outside our solar system are what we think they are for the simple fact that we cannot get up close and touch them. But we have very nice tested models that predict they exist and predict what we observe, so we now say we've "seen" one in the same sense that we know interstellar gas clouds exist and star formation exists etc. etc. You can likewise say the same thing in the other direction. We haven't really proven atoms exist, or quarks, or whatever. But we have high confidence in the existence of those things by virtue of the existence of the screen you are using to read this; that was designed using the same models that say those things "exist".