First ever black hole image released

[Itsallaguess]

Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said.

"It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47873592

It's absolutely amazing what we're able to do with arrays of radio-telescopes. The above article describes how the experiment was carried out -

No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is director of a project that set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes. Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.

A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days. The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives which were flown to a central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat".

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes."

Fantastic stuff...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[kiloran]

I thought black holes were generally relatively small(!), but this one is bigger than our solar system!!!! And 500 million trillion km away

The sheer physical size of our universe just defies comprehension

--kiloran

[UncleIan]

The sheer physical size of our universe just defies comprehension

Space is big. Really big.

[kiloran]

The sheer physical size of our universe just defies comprehension

Space is big. Really big.

Totally wrong! It's absolutely totally friggin' enormous. Or maybe even bigger.



--kiloran

[bungeejumper]

So we journey to the end of the universe, and what do we find? The biggest deep-fried greasy yellow donut of all time. I think Douglas Adams would have approved. I wonder if they do deliveries?

BJ

[Leothebear]

Either the science has changed or I had misunderstood.

I thought the black hole was created by a massive star imploding and the increasing gravitational force kept the implosion going until it was a singularity with virtually zero volume and gigantic mass - a black hole. This joker is more than the size of the solar system.

The sheer scale of the forces involved is beyond imagination.

Leo

(Back to clearing his own 'black hole' of a shed tomorrow.)

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Either the science has changed or I had misunderstood.

I thought the black hole was created by a massive star imploding and the increasing gravitational force kept the implosion going until it was a singularity with virtually zero volume and gigantic mass - a black hole. This joker is more than the size of the solar system.

The sheer scale of the forces involved is beyond imagination.

Leo

(Back to clearing his own 'black hole' of a shed tomorrow.)

I guess when they refer to its 'size' they are referring to the approximately spherical surface which defines it's current event horizon, i.e. the locus of the points at which gravity is so great that light cannot escape.

Matt

[Spet0789]

Either the science has changed or I had misunderstood.

I thought the black hole was created by a massive star imploding and the increasing gravitational force kept the implosion going until it was a singularity with virtually zero volume and gigantic mass - a black hole. This joker is more than the size of the solar system.

The sheer scale of the forces involved is beyond imagination.

Leo

(Back to clearing his own 'black hole' of a shed tomorrow.)

Once created, black holes can grow by accretion (pulling stuff in) as will have happened here.

They will also very very gradually shrink through the emission of Hawking radiation.

I don’t think the author was suggesting that the black hole was the size of the solar system. I think he meant the field of view of the whole image. The black hole itself will be about 400 AU across (1 AU = distance from Earth to Sun).

[Howyoudoin]

I watched the news live today and the unveiling of the photo, which to my untrained eye, looked like the mountain eye from Lord of the Rings. Nothing wrong with that, pretty cool huh.

On the news, all of NASA guys were clapping over the photo, but I wasn't really sure why?

Have we learnt any more about black holes since Hawking's hypothesis?

HYD

[gryffron]

I just thought it would be more... black.

[AsleepInYorkshire]

I watched the news live today and the unveiling of the photo, which to my untrained eye, looked like the mountain eye from Lord of the Rings. Nothing wrong with that, pretty cool huh.

On the news, all of NASA guys were clapping over the photo, but I wasn't really sure why?

Have we learnt any more about black holes since Hawking's hypothesis?

HYD

Yes.

1. The observable universe is the distance light has travelled since the big bang (my interpretation )
2. The universe is a lot bigger than the observable universe
3. Space is expanding faster than it was before
4. There's no edge to the universe unless you aren't sure then there is an edge or other universes or something else
5. All that pigging space and I can't travel 8 miles to work in a morning in less than an hour (in 'ull)
6. In the film Apollo 13 the Captain of the Iwo Jima (the aircraft carrier that picked up the returning astronauts) was played by Jim Lovell
7. There will be a test on this at the end of the week
8. I can, without contradiction, confirm my score will be nil
9. My favourite number is a googolplex
10. They are planning to build a Cern II which will be big and I've already forgotten what they are proposing to look for with it
11. They tell me the universe is flat - sheesh - I was just coming to terms with the big bang, wimps, dark matter, dark energy and bresick
12. Errr … I meant no. I haven't learned anymore about black holes But I didn't know much about them before. It is refreshing to see that they are actually black

AiY

[XFool]

Horizon programme, 9pm on BBC 4 today, was a documentary on the science team that carried out the work. They aim to image the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

First ever black hole image released

BBC News

[Spet0789]

On the news, all of NASA guys were clapping over the photo, but I wasn't really sure why?

HYD

They were septics.

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Either the science has changed or I had misunderstood.

I thought the black hole was created by a massive star imploding and the increasing gravitational force kept the implosion going until it was a singularity with virtually zero volume and gigantic mass - a black hole. This joker is more than the size of the solar system.

The sheer scale of the forces involved is beyond imagination.

Leo

(Back to clearing his own 'black hole' of a shed tomorrow.)

Once created, black holes can grow by accretion (pulling stuff in) as will have happened here.

They will also very very gradually shrink through the emission of Hawking radiation.

I don’t think the author was suggesting that the black hole was the size of the solar system. I think he meant the field of view of the whole image. The black hole itself will be about 400 AU across (1 AU = distance from Earth to Sun).

Like I said earlier the smallest thing that can be visually measured (as the imagery used visible-light spectrum telescope) is the surface defined by the event horizon. The visualisation is merely that of the accretion disk prior to it's disappearance over the EH.

Regards the surface of actual black hole itself there seem to be two opposing theories one being of a hard surface and the other saying that there is none. I believe it can have no such surface, since if light cannot withstand gravity at the EH, then surely no surface material can oppose such a field. Presumably space and time are undefined within the EH.

Matt

[AsleepInYorkshire]

Regards the surface of actual black hole itself there seem to be two opposing theories one being of a hard surface and the other saying that there is none. I believe it can have no such surface, since if light cannot withstand gravity at the EH, then surely no surface material can oppose such a field. Presumably space and time are undefined within the EH.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
Hawking radiation is required by the Unruh effect and the equivalence principle applied to black hole horizons.
...
Hawking used a black hole solution without a past region that forms at a finite time in the past. In that case, the source of all the outgoing photons can be identified: a microscopic point right at the moment that the black hole first formed.
…
The trans-Planckian problem is nowadays mostly considered a mathematical artifact of horizon calculations
…
A detailed study of the quantum geometry of a black hole event horizon has been made using loop quantum gravity. Loop-quantization reproduces the result for black hole entropy originally discovered by Bekenstein and Hawking. Further, it led to the computation of quantum gravity corrections to the entropy and radiation of black holes.

I haven't got a clue what all that means . However, not wishing to change the habit of a lifetime I just wanted to turn up to a gun-fight with a knife

What I think is interesting [at least for me] is this little comment...
In June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi space telescope, which is searching for the terminal gamma-ray flashes expected from evaporating primordial black holes. In the event that speculative large extra dimension theories are correct, CERN's Large Hadron Collider may be able to create micro black holes and observe their evaporation. No such micro black hole has ever been observed at CERN.

And my question is this … if space time does not exist within a black hole [and I assume it can't] and by default there must be a boundary where space time begins then at a quantum level this boundary must be infinitesimally finite and surely break classical quantum laws? Or is this layman's for "trans-Planckian problem"?

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Regards the surface of actual black hole itself there seem to be two opposing theories one being of a hard surface and the other saying that there is none. I believe it can have no such surface, since if light cannot withstand gravity at the EH, then surely no surface material can oppose such a field. Presumably space and time are undefined within the EH.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
Hawking radiation is required by the Unruh effect and the equivalence principle applied to black hole horizons.
...
Hawking used a black hole solution without a past region that forms at a finite time in the past. In that case, the source of all the outgoing photons can be identified: a microscopic point right at the moment that the black hole first formed.
…
The trans-Planckian problem is nowadays mostly considered a mathematical artifact of horizon calculations
…
A detailed study of the quantum geometry of a black hole event horizon has been made using loop quantum gravity. Loop-quantization reproduces the result for black hole entropy originally discovered by Bekenstein and Hawking. Further, it led to the computation of quantum gravity corrections to the entropy and radiation of black holes.

I haven't got a clue what all that means . However, not wishing to change the habit of a lifetime I just wanted to turn up to a gun-fight with a knife

What I think is interesting [at least for me] is this little comment...
In June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi space telescope, which is searching for the terminal gamma-ray flashes expected from evaporating primordial black holes. In the event that speculative large extra dimension theories are correct, CERN's Large Hadron Collider may be able to create micro black holes and observe their evaporation. No such micro black hole has ever been observed at CERN.

And my question is this … if space time does not exist within a black hole [and I assume it can't] and by default there must be a boundary where space time begins then at a quantum level this boundary must be infinitesimally finite and surely break classical quantum laws? Or is this layman's for "trans-Planckian problem"?

I dunno, but if you are really interested you can read lots of about this stuff online, e.g. by googling and finding the odd PhD thesis:

https://www.mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/pe ... t_broy.pdf

If you skip to about page 9 he starts going on about photon worldlines and horizons and stuff, so you *might* find this will help you sharpen your knife.

I just like to think that things within the EH are where things start to go a bit bananas!

HTH

[stewamax]

The news accounts all try to describe what the black hole looks like.
It would be more correct to say 'what it looked like' - since its light has been travelling 55 million years to get here - only ten million years after the extinction of dinosaurs.
It might itself have sneakily expired 54 million years ago and we would never know...

[UncleEbenezer]

Time doesn't work like that with special relativity (which is simple), let alone general relativity (which isn't). You need to abandon the naïve version that governs our everyday lives. Your 55 million years isn't meaningful here.

[Leothebear]

The news accounts all try to describe what the black hole looks like.
It would be more correct to say 'what it looked like' - since its light has been travelling 55 million years to get here - only ten million years after the extinction of dinosaurs.
It might itself have sneakily expired 54 million years ago and we would never know...

Got me wondering do black holes die?

https://www.space.com/34281-do-black-holes-die.html

[XFool]

Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image

BBC News

She appeared in last night's BBC 4 Horizon documentary.