Can you see a black hole?

The answer is yes.

Amazing. Simply amazing.


Side note: Thank you for posting this. I had completely forgotten that it was today.

I think it was Brian Cox who speculating that maybe - just maybe - some of the data recorded might cause some trouble with Einsteins equations, and might cause some re-evaluation.

The correct answer is "no." What you see is the accretion disk of plasma. The hole in the middle isn't visible.

Either way it's smiling at us.

Wow! This is astonishing.

Einstein comes up with a description of gravity over 100 years ago, and one of its theoretical consequences is the prediction of massive bodies--black holes--that so strongly distort space and time, that not even light can escape from within their horizons. Physicists derive many properties of these bodies, and make predictions about what they'll look like. Astronomers find radio sources that indicate the presence of these objects--one at the heart of our own galaxy--and indirectly detect their presence by observing the trajectories of stars moving through their assumed gravitational fields. And then scientists and engineers build an amazing telescope distributed over the globe, capture massive amounts of data, and constitute it into the first images of one of these objects.

And does it match the predictions? Sure looks like it does.

An incredible day for science. Bravo!

Did they find the Cygnus? Or Maximilian?

I bet you're fun at parties.

You have no idea...

Yes, we just need to x-ray your skull.

Holy Moly . . .

Holy hell, that is the second largest black hole I've ever seen.

so if it's 50 million light years away it may not exist anymore - we see it as it was 50 million years ago. That's pretty trippy!

Larger image!

And an article with an explanation of why the bottom of the ring is brighter.

The image reminds me of the illuminated machine gun reticle in the gunner's daylight periscope on an M60A3 (an area-target reticle rather than a more precise one, which is why I never used it).

For obvious reasons the slang term for it was the "flaming asshole".

And how gravitational lensing occurs, and why it looks like it does.

I love that film, and John Barry's score is just fantastic.

And now that I think about it, you can roll it all the way back to Newton's work. Einstein was thinking about how Newton's Laws would apply to light when he realized that they didn't describe everything perfectly and that's when he and his first wife, Mileva Marić, developed his theory of relativity.

There's 5 petabytes worth of data on those drives, and Katie Bouman used it to create the image of the black hole.

Love it! Wow those kitty reflexes never cease to amaze me.

Note to self: Evolve ability to climb back down before going up any more trees.

It's gotten all wobbly.

Images at the link.