First image ever of black hole!

[Pat Barry]

Here's a link

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...izon-telescope

Not as exciting as I hoped for. Also, not much danger in accidentally running into this with your spacecraft.

What do you think?

[Wade Lippman]

It is actually a picture of the event horizon. You can't photograph a black hole as it is black.

You also can't run into one. Due to time dilation in the intense gravity, you would never get there. At least from your perspective; from ours you would go right it at a very high speed.

[julian abram]

Very interesting, our universe is magnificently and wonderfully made, inspiring to the imagination.

[Doug Dawson]

Very interesting, our universe is magnificently and wonderfully made, inspiring to the imagination.

Indeed! "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet) What they went thru to get that image was astonishing and inspiring.

[Kev Williams]

--and what we see in the photograph actually happened a mere 15 million years after the big rock took out our dinosaurs- give or take a year...

boggles the mind...

[Michael Weber]

My understanding it is the Event Horizon as well. Might be the EH of a black hole or other theoretical conjecture like a gravastar or some yet unknown mathematical model. There are mathematical models that explain the big bang as the explosion of a black hole. As someone who barely managed graduation, I'm constantly amazed at the intelligence of some members of our species.

[Pat Barry]

Event horizon is not a very descriptive name. On ther other hand it sure looks a lot like a black hole.

[Michael Weber]

All the pictures show the extreme zoom in. Here's a zoomed out version that shows the black hole (or whatever) and everything it is consuming

[Steve Demuth]

It is actually a picture of the event horizon. You can't photograph a black hole as it is black.

You also can't run into one. Due to time dilation in the intense gravity, you would never get there. At least from your perspective; from ours you would go right it at a very high speed.

Not quite. The edge in the picture between bright and dark actually represents what is known as the "photon orbit" or "photon sphere." It's substantially larger than the event horizon. Light that passes the photon orbit limit can still be reflected back and escape the singularity, but almost none does. A photon's trajectory if it passes the photon orbit is either going to be straight into the event horizon, or an orbital spiral that eventually passes through the event horizon.

[Brett Luna]

The dark area, within the glow of the accretion disc, is also known as the event horizon "shadow." One the exciting things about the image is that the size of the shadow was as predicted by theory...about 2½ times the size of the event horizon itself. Indeed, the image is quite close to various computer-modeled images that were generated prior to the actual image being obtained.

From the European Southern Observatory:



A simulated image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. The dark gap at the centre is the shadow of the black hole.

Credit: Jason Dexter (left) and Kazunori Akiyama (right)

(Usage per the publisher's terms)

[Jerome Stanek]

Event horizon is not a very descriptive name. On ther other hand it sure looks a lot like a black hole.

I wouldn't know I never saw a black hole. I always thought a hole was something with nothing

[Pat Barry]

I wouldn't know I never saw a black hole. I always thought a hole was something with nothing

Ok, what about a donut hole?

[John K Jordan]

I read that. My scientist friends are all excited. What is just as interesting as the photo is how it was obtained.

BTW, the Science News site is a excellent source for lots of fascinating things.

JKJ

[Tom M King]

It's been my theory, for a long time, that matter, and energy are different states of the same stuff. Every galaxy has a black hole at its center, that is converting matter to energy. This theory covers the reason the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Energy repels, and matters attracts. As matter is being converted to energy, the amount of matter is decreasing, and the total amount of energy is increasing.

[Kev Williams]

Back in the early '80's a friend gave me a book from the local planetarium titled 'Black Holes and wardped space time". Some above have mentioned 'event horizon' isn't very descriptive. This book explained the event horizon as simply the points in space in which the gravity from a black hole begins tugging at any nearby mass; any asteroid or piece of rock passing outside a 'holes event horizon will maintain its trajectory; if it passes within the event horizon, no matter how slight, its trajectory will be altered by the gravity; if it passes far enough beyond the 'horizon to reach the point of no return, it won't be able to escape the gravity and will eventually be pulled into the 'simplicity'. Interesting take on the point of no return, at that point time and space change; on earth we're free to move about in space, but not time, but at the PONR an object must travel the speed of light to remain stationary, which means you're no longer free to move about in space, but you ARE free to move about in time... but it's a catch-22 because you're trapped in space...

And that's about all I know about black holes