First Image of a Black Hole

[Rural]

54 million light-years away with an estimated mass equal to 7 billion Suns, that's nutso.

With the image capture done by essentially using the entire earth as a telescope.

 

[mdk2isu]

Time to stock up on beer and whiskey

Which is different than the usual how?

 

[Bigman38]

This has a very good explanation of what we are seeing. This guy predicted what the picture would show even before it was released.

That's a pretty good video but holy crap that gets complicated.

 

[Boxerdaddy]

This has a very good explanation of what we are seeing. This guy predicted what the picture would show even before it was released.

Veritasium is highly recommended. He's does good work. He's even got a PBS 2 part show that I thought was pretty good on Uranium. Last i knew it was on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

 

[247cy]

Looks just like Chris Cornell said it would.

Heaven sent hell away
No one sings like you anymore

 

[kilroy]

So it is a fiery ball. Anything inside the inner orbit gets sucked in immediately up until the outer ring. The issue is, this light is not being reflected back to the scope, so it appears black. Telescopes work by capturing reflected light. What you are seeing is the pattern of light reflected that is bent around the event horizon. It's brighter on one side as that is the light that is coming towards us, the darker side is the light traveling away from us. Light itself orbits closer to the black hole creating a bright ring. But to answer your question, matter gets immediately sucked in around the black hole to a point. Up until that point, the pull is less. After that point, it's instantly gone hence an "orbit".

What's even crazier to think about is how space time around the black hole are altered. So the light we are seeing could very well be at different ages as well. Absolutely awesome.

I completely understand the shadow effect of how no light escapes and also that the bent reflections of the light and all we see is the reflected light but if it is a hard concept to grasp that there is something between us and the dark spot we see then (aka the fire ball) but you would think we would see some other reflected light if there was really 360° fireball around it.

They really need to get rid of the term accretion disk then because its confusing.

another thing that is funny is that if you could see the past (aka trapped light) that you couldn't interact with it because its just a light illusion at that point and only an image not an object so does it really effect time...

 

[ISUCyclones2015]

Applicable:

Ahhh what a classic. Was waiting for it

 

[isufbcurt]

Katie Bouman, who helped design the software and led the group, gave a TED talk about the process a few years back.

Nice, definitely WOULD!

 

[isufbcurt]

Great timing Sirius

 

[nfrine]

Saw the photo...thought it was another polar vortex.