Who else feels sad whenever something „out there“ get‘s more understandable through advances in science, by being reminded you a) will never fully understand it and b) you will most likely die before this whole “space mystery” will be solved (and I believe science will solve “it” someday…)?
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LOL. George Clinton was a guest on a weed cooking show last night. He cut all his dreds off. I had a sad.
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Can’t let them get too long; too much weight eventually starts to pull the follicles out from the root.
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@beschizza Thanks for sharing it. I look at the colors and contours of this image and it looks like a black hole sun to me
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Slightly purple prose from Dennis Overbye over at the NYT:
The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it. If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap, a black hole. Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish like a dream.
The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.
Nobody knows how such behemoths of nothingness could have been assembled. Dense wrinkles in the primordial energies of the Big Bang? Monster runaway stars that collapsed and swallowed up their surroundings in the dawning years of the universe?
Nor do scientists know what ultimately happens to whatever falls into a black hole, nor what forces reign at the center, where according to the math we know now the density approaches infinity and smoke pours from God’s computer.
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Good explainer! Thanks for posting.
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M87’s black hole, with a mass of several billion (with that explosively plosive, Carl Sagan ‘B’) Suns, has an event horizon “only” a few times the diameter of our Solar system.
I put “only” in quotes because of the different scales of size and distance that we face when we look into the cosmos.
On a human scale, that black hole is colossal. The New Horizons probe, which was at one time the fastest human-made object ever launched, needed almost 10 years just to get to Pluto.
Buuuuut… Given the incomprehensible size of the universe, and the distance involved, it is not easy to isolate a single star, or even an object slightly larger than the solar system when we look at distant galaxies. Instead we see only clouds of light. It truly is amazing that it is possible to resolve something that size at such a distance.
(Edited to clarify the thoughts expressed.)
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I always enjoy his approach to science education. Very approachable.
I also suggest PCS Space Time. They go a bit more in depth but still retain accessibility for people that are not physicists. I imagine they will have a video up soon on this black hole event.
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I was thinking the humidity in Florida might be getting to him. He moved out there a few years ago.
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Im guessing you are a Hitchiker’s Guide fan?
“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is”
I like your query…
I find comfort in knowing that my ignorance also defines my purpose. If somehow I had ALL the answers, then what would be left to experience? So… Don’t Panic!
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Because of the physics of a black hole and its effect on light emitted by sources very close to it, the angular position of the plane of the accretion disk is actually somewhat irrelevant to our ability to image it. The Veritasium video that @Garymon linked has a good visual explainer of why. (He’s also working on a follow-up video to be posted later today in the wake of the announcement itself.)
Also, what’s extra impressive is how well the modeled behavior and appearance line up with actual observations:
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My thoughts exactly, a glazed donut lying on Zorro’s cape.
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I think the telescopes track with the movement of the stars if they are looking at stars, but the planets move differently across the sky so if they are tracking a planet the stars show up like streaks.
have you seen the images that are taken while there is an earth quake. pretty cool stuff…the stars make little trails and act like a seismograph.
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I see what you did there 
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There’s big, and then there’s big-big, and then there’s bigbig
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There they go again, guessing cause from effect. I don’t care how precisely you’ve calculated the weight of a duck, and what it should look and sound like, nor do I care that this thing matches those calculations to impossible degrees of accuracy. You still don’t know it’s actually a duck. And you call yourself a nerd. Tsk
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Yes, it’s tricky work. I’m an engineer who works on this project, so I’m familiar with it.
This picture is made by several radio telescopes pointing at the black hole simultaneously, tracking it with arc-second accuracy, and recording the radio waves that arrive at ~230 GHz. The signals are downconverted to a few GHz, digitized and recorded on disk drives. Later, a correlator matches up the waves and corrects for the telescope positions down to an inch or so.
The amount of care required to make this image, and the decades of work developing the technology, is quite a thing.
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