It’s a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* and is 26,000 light years from Earth.
It’s about 6 million times the mass of the sun.
Exciting stuff!
Quote from NDTV:
"The black hole, Sagittarius A*, is right at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The photo has been taken using the Event Horizon Telescope which consists of a number of telescopes spread across the planet.
Black holes are immensely dense objects which don’t let anything escape from its gravity, not even light.
This is the first time we’ll be seeing a photo of a black hole. So far, everything you’ve seen has merely been an illustration based on some scientific study.
The Event Horizon Telescope uses a bunch of radio telescopes of different capacities, spread around Earth, that are linked together to combine signals. These create a VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer)."
In general relativity, an event horizon (EH) is a region in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman’s terms, it is defined as the shell of “points of no return”, i.e., the boundary at which the gravitational pull of a massive object becomes so great as to make escape impossible. An event horizon is most commonly associated with black holes. Light emitted from inside the event horizon can never reach the outside observer. Likewise, any object approaching the horizon from the observer’s side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon, with its image becoming more and more redshifted as time elapses. This means that the wavelength of the light emitted from the object is getting longer as the object moves away from the observer. The travelling object, however, experiences no strange effects and does, in fact, pass through the horizon in a finite amount of proper time.
More specific types of horizon include the related but distinct absolute and apparent horizons found around a black hole.
The thing seems to be smiling, a happy hole, nice to have plenty of happy holes out in space, we seem to be running out of them down here. ;-)
Seriously Pyxell, it’s great they could put that terrific picture together, thanks for showing it.
I just happened to be looking at the TV just before the news when they started it early with this bit of breaking news, so I stayed glued and photographed the TV screen.
Dunno about happy hole! They called it looking into the jaws of hell, due to its destructive power. :shock:
Still we are far enough away…at the moment.
Although I’ve heard there is a black hole in the middle of the Milky Way…our galaxy! :shock:
Longdogs, the hole is the black centre; the light around it is apparently what happens to light in the proximity of the hole…or something!
Fantasy becoming real lthink, so what we see is not the
actual core of the hole, but the red shift of of all the
objects, ( that have been captured by the hole )as they
approach the event horizon then Pyxell? I was wondering
how it could be pictured.
Thanks for your explanation, it helped a lot
Best Regards Donkeyman
A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.
Katie Bouman led development of a computer programme that made the breakthrough image possible.
For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible.
Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop.
She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.
In the hours after the photo’s momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter.
Event horizon? I thought this thread was about science
not brexit?
However, l do have a couple of my own theories about
this phenomenon. But l have lots of questions too,one
of which is about the speed of light! whch has for decades
been used as a constant figure in various maths formulas
& theories, ie, theory of relativity!
Surely current theories about black holes cast doubt on
any results obtained from these previous findings?
The reason l ask this is that it is suggested that light
Cannot escape from a black hole due to the immense
gravity field thought to be present in black holes!
Surely if this is so, then that infers that the light has been
stopped!
It then follows that the speed of light can be altered!
And that the range of variation can be from zero up to
the maximum speed as recognised at present?
And maybe even exceed the the now ’ so called’ speed of
light.
Can anybody confirm or disprove my idea!
Should be a doddle then to point the scope at the moon and show us some pics of the remaining lunar lander platform and lunar rover vehicle from the 1969 landings then. . . . !
I mean the moon is only a measly 384,400 km away !
Ahh!
The Event Horizon is a collection of RADIO telescopes so visual telescopes. Shame. I guess the picture of the black hole is thus some “artists impression” from a set of programmed algorithms as Surfermom mentioned.
The secret of photographing a black hole is to stand well back.
Anyway it is not an optical photo as I understand it (and remembering that I never got past page 4 of “A Brief History of Time”) it is a coloured frequency chart of radio emissions (different frequencies representing different elements/gases?) from the area of the black hole and it is a big hole too.
BTW the photo is of a black hole M87 which is 55 million light years away not 26000 - Sagittarius A is at the centre of our own galaxy and there is not a photo of that yet - I think there is some confusion here.
It took half a tonne of HDDs of data to create that image. The antenna was the equivalent of the size of a planet (or nearly - that bit I do understand)
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
(Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Or aging women over 50 who need reading glasses and wear skirts below the knee .
Good catch, Realist. I mistakenly referred to the M87 black hole as a photo (suggesting that it was taken in a visible wavelength), not an image. You are correct, it is most definitely and amalgam of radio signals collected by many radio telescopes. It’s an image.
More, it’'s an image of backlighting through the shadow of the black hole.
The longer-than-visible-light radio wavelengths were chosen for imaging because matter spiraling into the accretion disk around the black hole release tremendous amounts of radio waves due the heating of the spiraling matter.
Good point, safety first . Interesting post, Bruce.
) … :shock:
.