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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:
- Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper II: Array and Instrumentation
- Paper III: Data processing and Calibration
- Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
- Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
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.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:58PM (9 children)
From the fact that the central hole looks almost perfectly circular.
Suppose that the hole would be rotating along an axis perfectly orthogonal on the observation direction. Would you still see the black perfect circle in the middle? If so, why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:38PM (8 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:47PM (7 children)
And if the accretion disk(/rotation axis) is at an angle with the observation direction, wouldn't there be some of the accretion disks visible above the "mess in the middle"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @11:56PM (6 children)
"the accretion disk on the "far" side that has been bent into view to that appears to be above..."
you respond:
"wouldn't there be some of the accretion disks visible above"
OK, there's a single letter typo, but really, you're taking the fucking piss now, you really are.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @12:35AM
Ok, mate, that's my last message on the topic.
Look at the Saturn's rings, you see them going in front of the circle that is the planet itself.
Now, go back to the black hole and, no matter from which side of the black hole (far or near) the light from the accretion disk come from, I would expect to see at least a band of light crossing that perfect circle. Yeah, Ok, maybe that band is not uniform in light intensity, but to my mind it should be something
In extreme, if the accretion disc is thick enough, I'd expect it to obscure a part of the horizon circle and transform its image into a distorted ellipse.
So far, the best explanation I got is this [soylentnews.org], positing that one won't see the accretion disc shape, but it's light after being scrambled by grav lensing and (maybe) frame drag, and that scrambled light will mostly coming from the circumference (i.e. the light coming straight from the accretion disc itself is weaker and swamped by the light that escapes the 'scrambling').
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @06:54AM (4 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GVbuddri8 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:32AM (3 children)
The thing where I was wrong was about those oblique angles, and apparently you can see "through" where the event horizon is. My thinking was that any light path from my eye directly to the direction of event horizon would have no way of not going into the event horizon, and thus disappearing. However, the concepts of "directly to", "the direction", and "going into" stop meaning quite what you'd normally expect when space and time (this might be a time issue I've not considered) are so distorted. Even "where the event horizon is" begins to lose its meaning, as it's somewhat relative.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:46AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @08:02AM (1 child)
It was the grav lensing that I was missing from the picture, which is first degree approx of why the accretion disc will show very weakly represented in the number of pixels on the screen and pushed away from the 'face' of the black hole.
(the bright side of our whole kerkuffle: pays to be stubbornly wrong on purpose in the search of a better answer. Sometimes, at least. Apologies for annoying you)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday April 13 2019, @08:24AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves