My daughter and i are waiting excitedly, this should be cool!

National Science Foundation Event Horizon Telescope stream

National AstronomicalObservatory of Japan Stream

Some more info.

Tomorrow (right now!) six simultaneous press conferences around the world will broadcast the first results from the Event Horizon Telescope- a project that was designed to take the first ever image of a black hole. The announcement was described as 'groundbreaking' - so it's very likely the very first photograph of a black hole will be revealed to the world tomorrow!

We've never seen a black hole before- all the pictures you've ever seen are artist's impressions! By imaging a supermassive black hole scientists are hoping to test whether Einstein's theories are correct even at the most extreme place in the universe.


The EHT is not one single telescope, rather it is an international collaboration linking dozens of radio telescopes around the world. You'd need a gigantic dish in order to resolve an object as small as a black hole from half way across the galaxy; but by working together, using an array of telescopes from Europe, North and South America and even Antarctica, they can effectively make a telescope the size of the Earth - greatly increasing the power.

The event horizon- the zone beyond which nothing can escape- does indeed reflect or emit no light, so you cannot image it directly. However black holes are surrounded by a lot of very bright material- the ripped up remains of stars and gas clouds orbiting the black hole in a ring called an accretion disk. The extreme bending of light that happens near the black hole means the light emitted from this plasma-hot ring leaves a 'silhouette' of the event horizon- this is what the Event Horizon Telescope hopes to image.

Yep, watching it a well. I hope it lives up to the hype

Black Holes are the street sweepers of the Galaxy ?

SMITHSONIAN CHANNEL(TM) TAKES VIEWERS ON A QUEST TO CAPTURE THE FIRST IMAGE EVER OF A BLACK HOLE IN

"BLACK HOLE HUNTERS"

NEW DOCUMENTARY PREMIERES FRIDAY, APRIL 12 AT 9PM ET/PT

NEW YORK - April 1, 2019 - Smithsonian Channel is putting viewers in the passenger seat of the journey towards a cutting-edge outer space discovery. On the heels of a groundbreaking scientific announcement to be made on April 10, the network will air a new one-hour documentary following a team of international scientists as they attempt to document the first-ever image of a black hole. BLACK HOLE HUNTERS premieres Friday, April 12 at 9 PM ET/PT on Smithsonian Channel.

Dr. Sheperd Doeleman of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has led the Event Horizon Telescope project team, a collective of the top scientific minds from around the world, since 2006. The project combines radio observatories and telescope facilities from around the world to make up a virtual telescope with a diameter spanning the entire planet. This mega-telescope's ultimate mission: to capture the first image ever of a black hole. Although the concept of black holes has been long assumed to be fact, the Event Horizon Telescope's success would provide the first clear visual evidence of their existence. BLACK HOLE HUNTERS will bring viewers into the laboratories, behind the computer screens and beside the telescopes of what may prove to be one of the great astrophysical achievements in the history of mankind.


Read more at http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/...190401smithsonian01/#Zyx5GwZFh5HYWSLw.99

What are you expecting to see? Geraldo Rivera opening a secret vault?

LOL, no.

They've been running stories on it leading up to today with really clear images or renders, so expectations are high from the uneducated.
I just saw what they released. I'm impressed.

A fuzzy Eye of Sauron?

Seems similar to what was predicted back in the late 1970s:

https://luth.obspm.fr/~luminet/chap10.html

Wow. When I first learned of black holes as a young child in 1979-1980, I never imagined I'd ever see one. Now we have. What an amazing day for science!

No, no, no, PM... Blackhole, not @**hole!

I've analyzed the photo several times now and I STILL don't see Maximilian Schell in there.

I'm sorely disappointed.

No Andromeda Ascendant either.

Pretty awesome, the Euro stream was cool. That one scientist in happy/excited tears whilst talking. This is the sort of stuff they should be livestreaming into schools.

I came up with a kind of cool way to almost put this kind of thing into scale...

The Earth is a 65 sextillion ton ball of (mostly) iron 8000 miles in diameter.

To get an idea of THAT size - imagine a clock with very fine gearing so the second hand seems to move in a continuous, smooth motion.

If the clock is big enough you can just barely see the minute hand moving. Forget about that with the hour hand - it takes 12 hours for a revolution.

Now lets make this clock run at half speed - 24 hours for a revolution of the hour hand. Make that hour hand as long as the radius of the Earth and the tip will be moving a THOUSAND MILES PER HOUR.

The sun is approximately 109 times the diameter of the Earth, 330,000 times the mass, and over 1 million times the volume.

That black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.....

Monumental. With galactic proportions.

No offense meant, but that was a rather complicated way to say that a point on the equator moves at ~1000 miles/hour. Equator is ~40000km around, => 40000km/24h => ~1666km/h, or ~1000 miles/hour.
Now make that same calculation with the earth orbiting the sun, and you will get to ~67000 miles/hour or >100000km/h - wooooosh

Well now we know what they look like .... like a lot of other galactic images we've already seen. They must have some purpose though and after doing some mathematical calculations for several days i now realize that black holes will at some point regroup and consolidate into one which will suck up the galaxies in rapid succession until we are right back at the origin of the big bang.

How much you want to bet that this "momentous occasion" will be forgotten about by most people in about a week or two?

You may want to check your math.
Besides, the question whether the universe will expand forever, come to a standstill or eventually collapse again is still undecided. The mass of all visible matter (which includes black holes, ironically) is insufficient to stop the expansion. Even if the universe was so balanced that the expansion would come to a standstill (which is nothing but a fringe theory at this point) and all the galaxies were the be sucked into their own black holes (which is unlikely for a whole host of reasons) all the black holes of the universe would retain their momentum, and orbit each other.
SURE, their orbits will decay as their relative motion to each other deforms spacetime around them to create gravity waves. But that is such a slow process except for the last moments that it will take several orders of magnitude of the universe's current age before the last two black holes might merge.

A singularity large enough to fold space and create a gravity well that is large as the entire universe would likely tear our universe in half due to the ridiculous slope and structure of the curve. Perhaps that's what happened with the Big Bang...


Imagine, trillions of years from now, a child playing in their sandbox could be sifting all the sand in the entire known universe, after billions of rips(bangs) occured, one after another.


Back on point, technically it would be impossible for black holes to consolidate because that would require opposing the force of the expansion of our universe, which itself prevents time from flowing backwards, and there's not enough mass/energy in our universe to likely halt the expansion--because by halting this expansion, time would stop, and to stop time requires infinite slope which _could_ be achieved through relativistic mass of achieving the speed of light(not true mass, mind you), thus to halt the expansion would require infinite mass/energy. Can't happen. We will all continue to inflate like pastries rising from yeast until the end of time.

No, I'd be more worried about what happens when our bubble hits the maximum allotted bubblespace. Will some kid shake up our snow globe when that happens, to watch where all the starflakes may scatter and lay?



Lastly, another theory I love imagining is our universe as a hypersphere, and we're simply riding along the curve, which gives the impression of accelerating expansion. Eventually, though, the curve must curve in upon itself, squishing us all together before we're spat out the other "side."

Size comparison

https://m.xkcd.com/2135/?fbclid=IwAR1LC9JIJW8sS7VTbCNr3EEJ78uGRC0Z0v_A3S5Q2LPG2BbbmDwhV_OSosg

Omn nom nom nom

WhoCares and Zamzow, you both forgot to take into account the rotation of our solar system near the outer limits of one arm of our galaxy, not to mention the likely motion of the galaxy itself trough space (although the last one might be difficult to calculate).

As for the image, to me it's interesting in an "old photograph of unnamed people doing mundane daily tasks which haven't changed significantly since the photo was taken in the 1870's" kind of way. How much government money (from any and all governments involved) was spent to get it and how much will it and any knowledge gained from it directly benefit desperate people?

Boy you're a stinker, vonBaur.

Who cares how much it cost?

We're looking at a black hole! This is a monumental achievement for mankind!

I don't get it, this is the real Black Hole and it is swallowing the minds of humans at an alarming rate., yet none of the great scientists seem to have discovered its' devastating effects.

S!Blade<><

Opinions, Blast. That's all.

Complaining about money outside of PWEC is silly. This is a tremendous moment in mankind's history. Don't ruin the moment. :P

(because I /really/ don't want to tell you how I really feel outside of PWEC)


OK, I have not been watching this thread much, but I guess I should have bee. I didn’t see how the original topic could so easily go off the tracks.

So I guess I will have to either lock this or try to sort out and remove the bad stuff.

This question can be applied to ANY form of fundamental research. And the universal answer to it is,
- we don't know about the practical application
- but one day it will be useful, guaranteed.

The discovery of quantum physics was entirely idle in the early 20th century. But it brough us lasers, computers, cell phones, the GPS system, microscopes for the molecular level, the ability to place individual atoms and to build nano machines, it gave the key to understanding genetics, pretty much any kind of precision chemistry, or the design of new pharmaceutics. So, should we have directed the brains of Max Planck and his fellow physicists to rather work on something "directly useful"? Mankind is vastly better off now because we precisely didn't.
Also, who gets to decide who the "desperate people" are, and what kind of research activity will help them most? Because even if you're acting with the best intentions (and I guarantee you, people who get to decide how to spend other people's money will, in the majority of cases, not decide with "best intentions") you can't know in advance which research activity will yield the biggest benefit because if you already have the answer, it's not "reserarch" but refined application of what's known already.


What good is that newfangled round thing going to do? Grok keeps yapping about his "wheel". I say, it's going to get people killed if they are going to drive around in horse-drawn "wagons" or whatever they call these doodads that they're developing next to Grok's cave. They should better practice their stone throwing skills, gonna help everybody a lot more if they haul in more steaks from hunt, I say. And don't get me started about "fire". If it were god's will that we see at night, he wouldn't make the sun settle!

Believe it or not, it wasn't forgotten but intentionally omitted. In fact, the topic triggered a bit of a deja-vu moment, as I looked up/discussed the topic of earth/solar system/galaxy speed earlier this year with some colleagues at work.
Based on that, I seriously considered to add the speed of the solar system (relative to galaxy center/SagA*, I guess).
The thing then gets indeed troublesome with the speed of the galaxy, as it is slightly more difficult to define a reference point relative to which to observe/calculate the speed. Back then I looked it up, and I seem to remember that they came up with a few "results", like the speed of the "local group" of galaxies (incl. the Mikyway) , but also others...

This thread has now entered the "absurdity zone".

This post doesn’t make much sense after I have deleted several previous posts. Sorry. Some posts had good content as well as bad stuff that I deleted. So some good went with the bad.

I would argue that the picture in and of itself, while some may consider it cool, does absolutely nothing to actually further any of the mentioned research. The only thing it proved is that we have the capability of coordinating farflung telescopes to focus (more or less) on a single point in the universe an amazing distance from us. But this has been done already, many times over. And the picture isn't that great. It looks like they need to adjust the focal point a million or so light years. Or maybe close the aperture. Or reduce the exposure time.

Let me revise the question then, since money spent is such a touchy subject. Specifically what will be learned from this operation and how will it improve life on Earth for anyone? As an academic exercise, it was a marginal success (too out of focus to qualify as much more than that, in my opinion). As a practical exercise, not so much. Yes, I'm aware of the side benefits of other scientific research, particularly in the space programs. But what new innovations, or even refinements of existing technologies, were developed in the accomplishment of this? None I've heard of.

A couple years ago I took some pictures of the Solar eclipse with my cell phone. To me, it was something of a success, because I had researched declinations and azimuths. I preset the camera based on that and it was almost perfectly positioned: the Sun was in frame, nearly but not perfectly centered). But most of the pictures looked a lot like that one...if you didn't know what it was you'd have no idea what it was. So, good for them.They calculated it right and got the picture they wanted. But on a smaller scale, one befitting the equipment available to me, so did I. And I'm far from being an astrophysicist. So I'm less than impressed. If you want to be impressed, go ahead.

I love watching science programs. And I was excited by the prospect of "seeing" a black hole. Maybe I've become jaded by Hubble and Kepler, Voyager and Cassini. I'm looking forward to What Parker comes up with. But to me, this was pretty much the astronomical version of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault (nod to PanzerMeyer). As Shakespeare once said, Much Ado About Nothing. If you feel differently, go ahead.

You have demonstrated with these few words that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about by applying your superficial knowledge about photography to this specific case of radiointerferometry. There simply is no basis for a serious debate of the topic with you.

The picture of a black hole about the size of our solar system from a distance of more than 50 million light years is a triumph of measurement engineering that is almost on the level of the proof of gravity waves a few years ago. It is nobody's fault but your own if you miss the significance of it.

The difference here, vonBaur, is we've never definitively proven that black holes exist. We have radio telescopes that have given us clues, utilized gravitational lensing, x-rays, galactic rotation and more, but we were never sure. Here, seeing /is/ believing. The first photographic proof that these things truly exist. And not only that, but they exist in the way we have modeled and predicted through various theories and calculations.

This experiment verifies our methodologies, which is valuable in that we don't have to throw out existing science and start over. We can continue down the path we started a century ago, which may lead to greater discoveries.


Your example, vonBaur, a photo of the moon during eclipse, doesn't even compare nor deserve to be in the same category. We know the moon exists--we can see it every day. Black holes--not so much. And the physics behind those black holes--absolutely not.

The image is grainy because they had to take multiple images from multiple telescopes to form a virtual lens the size of our planet to form this composite image. You are familiar with the inverse square law, no? Are you also familiar with how photons travel through space from their origination point? The inverse square law is a simplified way to see something you can't, but at a distance of over 53 million light years, those rays ten spread out significantly, thus the need for a lens the size of our planet. They did this without constructing such a physical lens, which saved us trillions of dollars, and were aided in this through the use of algorithms which will allow us to observe and collect data on other phenomena that were otherwise unobservable until now.

To make sense of this, imagine a hundred boats leaving port, each with a vector one degree off from the other. At one hundred yards, they won't be that far apart. At a mile, it will be noticeable. At a hundred miles--/very/ noticeable. At a million miles? They might not even be able to see one another. Now imagine being a billion miles away and trying to create an image of those boats in one frame. The inverse square law works in a similar manner, except with rays of light, and instead of trying to piece together an image of all the boats now, we're trying to piece together their original point of journey, but from each of those boats where they are now, not where they were then. We have to catch enough of them to infer their original location and structure. This is likely a poor example and not clear enough, but know that seeing something at that distance in such detail and resolution as a photograph of your brothers, sisters, friends and parents at the zoo isn't only unlikely, but quite impossible.

So we don't look at the fine details, we look at the changes over time from a string of images, to determine the interactions of matter with spacetime in the accretion disk outside of the event horizon. By stringing together a series of images, we can learn huge amounts of information.



I once looked at a ten second video of a coronal mass ejection from our sun, strung together over time, and showed it to my father-in-law. He thought it was interesting but didn't think much of it. To most it would look the same. But to a trained eye, one can follow the path of the CME to infer the slope and curvature of spacetime and more, to generate a better understanding of the physics behind our reality and verify if what we are doing is truly correct.

To go from here to the moon, we might be able to use a slide rule. To go from here to Andromeda, if we use a slide rule we might end up lost in space forever.

Remember, scientist are proving black holes exist with the same scientific processes, documentation and calculations that prove global warming.exist.

Tired of people trying to slip in their political shots. You know better and did it with intent. Warning you not to do it again.

Or you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?

The *best* image from Hubble of M87 is the entire *galaxy* as a moderately sized fuzzy dot, with the jet from the black-hole visible streaming from it.



That we have been able to isolate the black hole, a single 'star' system within a 1 trillion star elliptical galaxy as more than just a 'dot' is immensely impressive, especially since it was done within and through our atmosphere.

What is imaged isn't the black hole itself of course, nor even the event horizon, but rather than much larger "first stable orbit" of relativistic matter *just* able to stay in the accretion disk around it.

The angular resolution of the recent image is around 20 microarcseconds. (20 millionths of an arc second...). < roughly the size that last full stop would appear if the screen was on the moon and you were at home, using your unaided eye. That is mind-bogglingly tiny.

Just so I know what I am looking at...the black hole is the bright round thing in the top left area...right?
Not the gas sort a round thing to the lower right of center....

What you are looking at there is 1 trillion stars (1 million, million) in M87 elliptical galaxy (the bright splodge in the origin of the jet) and the relativistic jet coming from the 1% galactic mass supermassive black-hole at it's centre (the long filament streaming towards the camera). This is the highest resolution image of it from the Hubble mission, though not in the tiny 'dead' area used for the ultra-deep imaging mission. It might be possible to improve on it by an order of magnitude or so.

The new image, as linked higher in the thread is a solar system scale single 'system' of the blackhole (invisible), event horizon (also not visible) and the innermost stable relativistic orbits of the accretion disc around it. A *completely* different scale of imaging and image processing.

It is 1 trillionth of the galaxy only previously imaged as a small bright splodge, and the first time a black hole has been directly imaged, even in part, as opposed to inferred from lensing and orbital mechanics and other astronomical markers.

It's a pretty amazing week for astrophysics! Congratulations to all involved! (Cause I am sure all those scientists are lurking around here somewhere!) And a special thanks to all you cheeky little taxpayers (myself included) who made this incredible discovery possible!

Bumping this to make sure the warning is clear. Missed this in my first cleanup.

It was a way of "putting it into scale".

Imagine the hour hand of your watch, or clock, at HALF speed, with the tip moving 1000mph.

That's the size of the Earth...

I confess I did kind of present it almost like how I would to kids...