First photograph of black hole to be unveiled next week.

[Juniiii]

NOTE: If this can be in news please move it there, if not just keep it here.

 

SOURCE SOURCE 2

 

 

Next Wednesday, astronomers around the world will have a press conference of what might be the first ever photograph of a black hole (at least for us humans, we don’t know if aliens got to this already  ). They were able achieve this by using a network of telescopes called the ‘EHT’, this is pretty cool to say the least...

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For several years, astronomers have been using it to peer into Sagittarius A*, the monster black hole at the center of our galaxy with the goal of looking past the space debris to see its event horizon, the point at which matter and light can no longer escape.

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But aren't black holes, well, black, and thus invisible, so none of our telescopes can "see" them? Yes – therefore the image we're likely to see will be of the "event horizon," the edge of the black hole where light can't escape.

My thoughts of how you could get a picture of a black hole (before this story came out) was to take a photograph where the background would be lit and very active with a collection of stars and you can see where the black hole would possibly be because the view of the other stars are obviously blocked out of view. But I wonder how they managed to do this, and it would be cool to find out next Wednesday. Let us know about your opinion and how they might’ve done something like this. I really feel like in the next few years the advancement of space exploration will advance by a whole lot. I just really hope we will have the technology later on in the future to be able to travel to near by stars, or at least leave the solar system without waiting 30+ years... 

[Bananasplit_00]

Oh cool, hope it looks sick

[TechyBen]

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the edge of the black hole where light can't escape.

You still cannot see that.

 

So this will be the bit of matter/dust/hot gass around the edge of the edge of the event horizon. The bit where light still can just barely escape.

 

PS, I'm expecting it to just be a picture of space, with some pixels "hot" in the middle. We can practically get pictures of the "core" of the galaxy already. Using more data you can filter out other stars, then get readings (x-ray/infra red?) on the larger gas clouds around the supermassive guy (I forget his name).

 

All in all, it's rather a boring picture. Like looking at the sun.

 

But looking at the sun with filters, or at hot spots/flares is cool. I doubt we are at that level for this thing though!

 

[tikker]

3 hours ago, TechyBen said:

So this will be the bit of matter/dust/hot gass around the edge of the edge of the event horizon

And guess what the telescope is called? The Event Horizon Telescope  

 

This is done with a very high frequency radio telescope, so we are relatively unaffected by all the dust (and gas to some extent) between us and Sgr A*, whose effect decreases in the radio towards longer wavelengths. It'll be a pretty nice picture I think, probably similar to the predictions made here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.01817.pdf

Also, if I remember correctly, what they're actually looking for is the "shadow" of the black hole, i.e. the emission we don't see, but this is of course set by what we do.

[CarlBar]

13 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Oh cool, hope it looks sick

 

Don't you mean: I hope it looks back...

[TechyBen]

11 hours ago, tikker said:

And guess what the telescope is called? The Event Horizon Telescope  

 

This is done with a very high frequency radio telescope, so we are relatively unaffected by all the dust (and gas to some extent) between us and Sgr A*, whose effect decreases in the radio towards longer wavelengths. It'll be a pretty nice picture I think, probably similar to the predictions made here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.01817.pdf

Also, if I remember correctly, what they're actually looking for is the "shadow" of the black hole, i.e. the emission we don't see, but this is of course set by what we do.

Sgr A*... that was his name.

[TechyBen]

On 4/4/2019 at 10:13 AM, TechyBen said:

Sgr A*... that was his name.

Hey, wait what? It was not Sagittarius A... our Milky Way giant... but a different black hole. So... Um.

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The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55m light years from Earth.

I knew ours is the closest, but also hard to view because of our location/angle to it and the accretion disk and the subsequent galactical arm of stars in the way. But assumed they were using some x-ray/infrared and/or some inference/lensing.

 

But makes sense we can look at a more head on angle to other galaxies... but wow, those are FAR away.

[Juniiii]

38 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Hey, wait what? It was not Sagittarius A... our Milky Way giant... but a different black hole. So... Um.

I knew ours is the closest, but also hard to view because of our location/angle to it and the accretion disk and the subsequent galactical arm of stars in the way. But assumed they were using some x-ray/infrared and/or some inference/lensing.

 

But makes sense we can look at a more head on angle to other galaxies... but wow, those are FAR away.

I’m very disappointed of what the picture actually turned out to be, but I don’t know what I was expecting so I can’t be too disappointed.

[Juniiii]

1 minute ago, Sushimus said:

Its so weird to think or a black hole as a sphere, when put on a flat plane with a large divit it's easy... but trying to wrap your mind around the idea there's an immeserable amount of mass in a spheric shape with a finite surface area... My brain is literally having a difficult time trying to conceptualize it. Like you can go 'under', 'over', AND around it.. but it has immeserible mass in it. Like there's a calcuable center point to it where it's densest and everything. alskjdghglkjtnrlagkjrnsgrskjtrnhjnhlkadglkngfslkjtn

It be lik that somtimes

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, TechyBen said:

Hey, wait what? It was not Sagittarius A... our Milky Way giant... but a different black hole. So... Um.

I knew ours is the closest, but also hard to view because of our location/angle to it and the accretion disk and the subsequent galactical arm of stars in the way. But assumed they were using some x-ray/infrared and/or some inference/lensing.

 

But makes sense we can look at a more head on angle to other galaxies... but wow, those are FAR away.

They apparently took data from 2 black holes. SgrA* and Messier 87

 

The image released was the Messier 87.

 

I thought that SgrA* was coming today, but I guess not?

[dalekphalm]

49 minutes ago, Juniiii said:

I’m very disappointed of what the picture actually turned out to be, but I don’t know what I was expecting so I can’t be too disappointed.

I'm not disappointed at all. Messier 87 is 55 million Light Years away.

 

In the future, we'll be able to generate higher resolution images with greater detail (especially as newer and larger Telescopes come online).

 

I'm hoping they still release a picture of SgrA* soon though.

[tikker]

2 hours ago, Sushimus said:

Its so weird to think or a black hole as a sphere, when put on a flat plane with a large divit it's easy... but trying to wrap your mind around the idea there's an immeserable amount of mass in a spheric shape with a finite surface area... My brain is literally having a difficult time trying to conceptualize it. Like you can go 'under', 'over', AND around it.. but it has immeserible mass in it. Like there's a calcuable center point to it where it's densest and everything. alskjdghglkjtnrlagkjrnsgrskjtrnhjnhlkadglkngfslkjtn

As is often the case with things that are (practically) infinite and the likes   The mass is not immeasurable though, we can do that. The point is concentrating that mass in a small enough region to create a singularity.

 

2 hours ago, Juniiii said:

I’m very disappointed of what the picture actually turned out to be, but I don’t know what I was expecting so I can’t be too disappointed.

What did you expect? 

 

I find the image pretty amazing. Especially how well it matches predictions.

 

3 hours ago, TechyBen said:

Hey, wait what? It was not Sagittarius A

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

I thought that SgrA* was coming today, but I guess not?

Yeah they took M87 for multiple reasons. Two that I know are:

1. We have a much clearer view on the black hole in M87, whereas for Sgr A* is obscure by lots of dust because we are, unfortunately for this, right in the disk of our Milky Way.
2. The event horizon / accretion disk around M87's black hole is larger, because the black hole is more massive (edit this is nullfied by, despite being ~1000 times bigger,  being ~2000 times further away), and the disk varies more slowly compared to the one around Sgr A*. The observations were taken over multiple days, whereas the disk around Sgr A* shows variations over timescales of minutes if I remember correctly.

So M87 was "easier" to do and Sgr A* requires a bit more analysis.

[tikker]

31 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

In the future, we'll be able to generate higher resolution images with greater detail (especially as newer and larger Telescopes come online).

The next "generation" of images will pose an interesting challenge. Ffor radio observations the resolution is largely set by the largest distance between two antennas, which in this case was practically the Earth. So we'll have to go to space next to further increase the resolution

[TechyBen]

52 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

They apparently took data from 2 black holes. SgrA* and Messier 87

 

The image released was the Messier 87.

 

I thought that SgrA* was coming today, but I guess not?

Yep. Only just got to that bit this second, so popped back on here. Lol for the most of reports being one or the other and confusing me. XD

[Radium_Angel]

Sam Neill unavailable for comment.

[HarryNyquist]

2 hours ago, Sushimus said:

Its so weird to think or a black hole as a sphere, when put on a flat plane with a large divit it's easy... but trying to wrap your mind around the idea there's an immeserable amount of mass in a spheric shape with a finite surface area... My brain is literally having a difficult time trying to conceptualize it. Like you can go 'under', 'over', AND around it.. but it has immeserible mass in it. Like there's a calcuable center point to it where it's densest and everything. alskjdghglkjtnrlagkjrnsgrskjtrnhjnhlkadglkngfslkjtn

Another crazy thing is that the picture the ESA took is actually the entire black hole. Because gravity warps space (and time), the intense lensing effect allows us to see every "side" of the hole at once. If there WAS a surface at the event horizon, the distortion would be so great that you could see the entire surface when looking at it from any angle.

[dalekphalm]

5 hours ago, tikker said:

The next "generation" of images will pose an interesting challenge. Ffor radio observations the resolution is largely set by the largest distance between two antennas, which in this case was practically the Earth. So we'll have to go to space next to further increase the resolution

Indeed, radio telescopes have reached certain limits in this regard. I think once in the future we have more space telescopes operating (especially if we toss a few in Lunar orbit), we can get much more interesting results.

[tikker]

8 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Indeed, radio telescopes have reached certain limits in this regard. I think once in the future we have more space telescopes operating (especially if we toss a few in Lunar orbit), we can get much more interesting results.

Indeed, especially at the lowest radio frequencies currently inaccessible to us I think there are still insights waiting to be discovered.