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Event Horizon Telescope Team Releases First Image of a Black Hole

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

upstart writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @06:54AM (4 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 12 2019, @06:54AM (#828518) Journal

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GVbuddri8 [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo [youtube.com]

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:32AM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday April 12 2019, @07:32AM (#828521) Homepage
    First link is fantastic - thanks for posting. The animation is indeed kinda trippy. If you single step through it, you will see several features I mentioned, such as the donut shape still being quite clearly donutty even when the axis is tipped quite a long way (though it's not exactly obvious where the axis is relative to the orthogonal ones marked is), and part of that is because there's always some part of a perfectly circular halo visible above and below the centre even when we're orthogonal to the axis.

    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.
    --
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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:46AM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday April 12 2019, @07:46AM (#828523) Homepage
      The second vid basically says exactly what I've been saying all along, just with some numbers on it. It's not quite the appropriate model for a spinning black hole, but he claimed to have one about that, I'll try to hunt that out.
      --
      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)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 12 2019, @08:02AM (#828527) Journal

        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)

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        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford