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.