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I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?
I always thought we have photographed black holes. Any idea/link to article where it explains why this took so long and why it was difficult?
All of the data used to generate the image was gathered by around a dozen different telescopes around the world. The black hole itself also needs to be in a specific configuration in order for us to be able to see it. It needs to have an accretion disk that's generating light. It needs to be sufficiently large or close. And it can't be obfuscated by other astronomical objects like stars or nebulae. This black hole itself is hugeeeeee and far. It's about the size of our solar system, but it's ~52 million light years away.
I always thought we have photographed black holes. Any idea/link to article where it explains why this took so long and why it was difficult?
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Yes, we're using a telescope the size of the Earth to look at an object the size of our solar system in a galaxy about 55 million light years away. It's an infinitesimally small patch of sky. On the other hand, the jet from the M87 black hole is quite large and we have good images of it. It's even resolvable by amateurs, I hope to take a picture of it over Easter with a small telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
> 55 million light years didn't he correct himself and said kilometers
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It doesn't look anything like Gargantua in Interstellar, but it's not really supposed to, except for the most prominent features. Interstellar showed what a black hole might look like in visible light while in orbit around it. This is a radio telescope image from a far away galaxy.
Interstellar also turned off the doppler effect, maybe to get a boring symmetric ring instead of an awesome asymmetric one as nature intended it to be!
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...
> Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the speed of light.
> ...
> Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”
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What are you basing that on? (Edit:) From one of the papers released today: > The ring is brighter in the south than the north. This can be explained by a combination of motion in the source and Doppler beaming. As a simple example we consider a luminous, optically thin ring... Then the approaching side of the ring is Doppler boosted, and the receding side is Doppler dimmed...This sense of rotation is consistent with…
Are north and south in astronomy defined relative to Earth’s poles? What about “lateral” directions, since east and west are relative (no poles, ie. no east of earth)?
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So amazing that scientists were able to predict what something would look like that we have never seen before.
It's good science. Been able to make testable predictions and then confirming them or disproving them is the entire (awesome) point.
I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?
It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.
It's enough to confirm various predictions, and should give a new baseline for truth about black holes.