NOTE: See update below for the reveal.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is unveiling a major black hole discovery Wednesday morning (April 10), and you can watch the event live.
We live in the golden (or maybe platinum) age of astronomy. At 9 a.m. EDT today, the group of astronomers who run the global network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil the first-ever images of a black hole.
The EHT, a global effort to capture the first-ever photo of a black hole’s immediate environment, by looking for radiation from the event horizon surrounding a black hole. They will announce first results during a press conference Wednesday at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT). You can watch it live from the National Science Foundation:
Of course, this is still speculation as EHT team members haven’t revealed what the result is, but an NSF media advisory described it as “groundbreaking.”
So it’s not outlandish to speculate that the project may have succeeded in its goal, and that we may be treated to a spectacular image of a black hole’s silhouette.
I think it is worth watching either way.
UPDATE: Here it is. Inside object M87, some 55 million light years away.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.
Press release:
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276
“So it’s not outlandish to speculate that the project may have succeeded in its goal, and that we may be treated to a spectacular image of a black hole’s silhouette.”
Or it could go something like this…
so a black hole actually looks like an out of focus doughnut , OK, I’ll buy that. Could we use it for carbon capture? Need some more money?
Outstanding!
With a modern spacecraft and a million years we could get a close-up look.
Trump XXXIX could announce it!
In a TARDIS we could get there during the commercial break.
55 million years (at least, given the expansion of the universe). At the speed of light too.
Craaazy numbers
Black Holes, of course, have gravitational fields so powerful that light cannot get out.
Ages ago when the concept was first being reviewed, I had a tee-shirt.
Maybe from “Space and Telescope” magazine.
“Black Holes Are Out Of Sight”
They still are.
I agree. Cosmology has become as corrupt as climate science. Or should I say climate science became as corrupt as cosmology since the corruption of cosmology started with the General Theory of Relativity.
My prediction is, we are going to start “seeing” 100’s of pictures of other black holes. Since 1 black hole is supposed to be at the centre of every galaxy, there should be many black holes closer than 55 million light years away since there are many galaxies closer than that. Wiki lists 143 that are closer than 12 million light years away.
The problem with this is that the closer the galaxy the harder it is to see the black hole that does not emit light. You have to get really really really far away to see a black hole. For some odd reason… I am sure a cosmologist can explain it! Sure.
You also have to have the correct geometry. If the arms of a galaxy are between you and the hole, you won’t be able to discern the disc. Of course all they have done on this image is clearly image the disc of collapsing matter.
Then I have seen pix similar to a black hole. I left the lens cap on my Nikon.
The NZ university Professor who solved some the equations involved with Black Hole Theory in the early 60s was able to watch the ‘live reveal’
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12221370
‘Kerr is an eminent mathematician known internationally for discovering the Kerr Vacuum, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity.
Awarded the British Royal Society’s Hughes Medal in 1984 and the Rutherford Medal from the New Zealand Royal Society in 1993, he was also made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2011, and was awarded the 2013 Albert Einstein medal by the Albert Einstein Society in Switzerland.
Here is a normal photo of M87.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060520.html
Just like the models had predicted. It has a rather thick disk.
“unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.”
Is it still “visual” evidence, even though they are using radio telescopes?
Are electron microscope images visual evidence even though they are using electrons and not light?
Jim
It is all EM regardless, just spectrum specific

The Human Eye Visible portion of the EM Spectrum is only around 2% of the entire EM Range
You have 12 orders of magnitude there, and there is not end to either end of the spectrum. Where do you get your 2% from?
You are correct there it is far less than 2% (Actually 0.0035%)
At what frequency / wavelength does the spectrum end in that calculation ( both directions please ).
“. . . and there is not end to either end of the spectrum.”
I’ve occasionally wondered about this. Would there–at least theoretically– be a maximal EM radiation having a fundamental half-wavelength the size of the universe (“visible” and/or inflationary if I understand the arguments for this distinction correctly). And, at the “other side,” is the minimum wavelength determined by the Planck distance?
Surprisingly, to me at least, I’ve never heard any discussion about the EM spectrum ever ever address this issue.
I know I am somewhat late to see and comment on this discussion, but I would very much appreciate any clarification.
Right, Robert –
the lower limit is Planck distance, the upper limit is halve the universe’s diameter.
_______________________________________________________________________
The real extensions are either found in the laboratory, with experimental physics + mathematics – other we will never know.
Thanks so much. Johann. I very much appreciate the response.
I am still thinking that the upper limit is twice the universe’s diameter. Much like a rope with each end fixed and the remainder vibrating “up and down” with no nodes (i.e., the midpoint having maximal amplitude).
What do you think?
Are you aware of any published discussion of this matter?
Interesting answere.
maybe here’s to look further :
https://www.google.com/search?q=rope+with+each+end+fixed+and+the+remainder+vibrating+%E2%80%9Cup+and+down%E2%80%9D+with+no+nodes+(i.e.%2C+the+midpoint+having+maximal+amplitude).&oq=rope+with+each+end+fixed+and+the+remainder+vibrating+%E2%80%9Cup+and+down%E2%80%9D+with+no+nodes+(i.e.%2C+the+midpoint+having+maximal+amplitude).&aqs=chrome.
Wal Thornhill: Black Hole or Plasmoid? | Space News
In this interview recorded on April 8, 2019, physicist Wal Thornhill discusses why the recent so-called “first picture of a black hole” actually affirms the plasma cosmology hypothesis that the object at a galactic core is not a black hole at all but an ultra-high density energy storage phenomena called a Plasmoid.
Thanks again, Johann, for taking the time to respond.
Is it still visual evidence if it no longer exists? We are observing the object within M87 as it existed right at the end of the Paleocene, a time when small mammals just started to flourish on Earth.
Sal,
What evidence do you have that it does not exist today? Absent such evidence, I can answer your question: Yes, this image is visual evidence of the existence of a black hole at the center of M87.
I said “if it no longer exists”
BTW, thank you for answering my rhetorical question.
Ah, the cosmological version of “If a tree falls in the forest…”
Black holes are rather durable, to put things mildly.
Two of the telescopes making up the EHT are in Hawaii on top of Mauna Kea: The James Clerk Maxwell telescope and the Sub Millimeter Array.
Einstein was right. Again.
He was wrong this time.
In what way?
He thought black holes were so strange it wasn’t worth looking for them.
Looks like an eclipse to me.
To me, it strongly resembles an Einstein Ring lensing effect. I wonder how much of the brightness in the “Ring” is from background Radio Band EM being bent around it rather than material caught by it and being ripped apart.
Looks like gravitational lensing to me. No the first time that has been observed.
Real science without a political agenda! How exciting, awesome and refreshing!
Just wait….
That reminds me of an American sports reporter who described an event to his colleague. ‘Awesome, said the colleague,
‘Awesomer’, said the reporter!
This is mind blowing. Ever since first reading about black holes in junior high in the late 80s, I wondered if I’d ever get to “see” one.
Knowing that black patch represents light not coming back at all is simply astounding. There’s something there, but the only way to know is because that bright ring of matter is framing it just so.
Quite amazing!
So it isn’t a picture of Sagittarius A* but of M-87. The previous post seem to imply Sagittarius A*. A picture of Sagittarius A* is in the works, apparently.
Jim
“So it isn’t a picture of Sagittarius A* but of M-87. The previous post seem to imply Sagittarius A*.”
In that last article I went to the link to find out which black hole they were talking about and it said the Milky Way. I’m pretty sure I read that right. I posted about it in the previous article.
Black holes spin. The accretion disk for this galaxy appears to be almost perfectly normal to our telescopes. If they looked at Sagittarius A they would not see a disk, but just a line, as we are not normal to the center of our galaxy. “Normal” also means “at right angle.”
It’s Sagittarius A* or Sagittarius A-Star. Sagittarius A is the larger region that contains Sagittarius A*.
I’m not sure. Our solar system is in the plane of the galactic disk. I assume Sagittarius A* is also rotating in the same fashion. We would be looking roughly at the “side” of the black hole in that case.
Jim
There might not be an accretion disk at all for Sgr A*. It is in a quiescent (abnormally low luminosity) state. In astrophysical terms, it is about 100 million times less luminous for its size than M87. There may not be enough background luminosity for it to show as a shadow. Not to mention that the pictures don’t confirm the existence of an event horizon, which is the thing that makes a black hole a black hole and not just some other exotic form or matter. There are competing models of these compact objects that are just as compact for their mass and just as dark. They might be distinguished by their magnetic fields. Astronomers still have a ways to go in sorting this out, but the picture of M87 is still a great achievement.
You say compact, but they are claiming that the diameter of the beast is about 27,000 times greater than the sun (i.e. 38 billion km!). For perspective, Neptune sweeps out an average 9 billion km diameter, so the M87 black hole is supposed to be more than 4 times bigger than a sphere that would fit into the orbit of Neptune.
ref: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-first-picture-event-horizon-telescope
Superb astrophysics science. As big a breakthrough as LIGO gravity waves.
And we are seeing breakthroughs in other basic science areas. Effective immunotherpies for cancer (Keytruda saved Jimmy Carter from metastatic melanoma). GMO salmon. Maybe soon LIC energy storage (wrote about that in the Fisker article).
Yes, great strides. I think these are still mysteries;
The math for Quantum Inertia has been offered, and it seems to accurately account for the effects of Dark Matter. But the math doesn’t ‘prove’ that QI is real.
The recent supernova AT2018cow is between 10 and 100 times more energetic than a supernova should be according the math.
Theories that try to explain that star (Przybylski’s Star) that contains huge amounts of plutonium and other elements not found in nature can’t be helped by the math used in describing nucleosynthesis.
Plutonium is found in nature, albeit in small quantities.
Yeah but what does it sound like?
You’ve heard of White Noise? This is Black Noise. 🙂
“Yeah but what does it sound like?”
I don’t know what a Black Hole sounds like but when two Black Holes merge it sounds like a phone ringtone. Computer generated, of course. 🙂
We can now test John Wheeler’s proposition that ‘black holes have no hair’. Let’s have a good look.
a photo that actually is something like out of the old movie The Black Hole.
This is not a picture of a black hole, it’s a picture of something, its interpreted as a black hole. Every blurry furry creature in a photo was bigfoot to bigfoot researchers too.
To assert you know what is in that photo, based on only actual evidence you have, the photo, is laughable.
I dont call that “superb astrophysics” because that object and/event can never be called anything else but a black hole, no other idea is even considered #scienceNot
The reaction to this photo is akin to the celebration at Cern when they claimed to have found the HB, even though it doesn’t allegedly survive long enough to be detected in the first place.
A signal that could have come from software, hardware or something else, but we’ll never know cos we can not re run the experiment, yet the whole place celebrated, not one skeptical voice..
The same here, not a jot of skepticism and it actually being called a black hole.. wow!
Science is in a pickle because of this immense amount of hackery and back slapping kudos hunting
Someone mentioned LIGO, they did not detect gravitational waves, they interpreted their data as such.
I’m off to dig up Newton et al and reanimate them
The difference here is that the measurements they took of the entity that they captured in these images match exactly that which is predicted by Einstein’s equations, which predict something never before encountered. A pretty good indication that this is what they think it is.
Eh, when you open your eyes Mark, your retinas do not detect photons, your brain interprets the data as such. You and I would not doubt that interpretation for one moment but does this mean that the only requirement for cognition is familiarity?
Err… rhodopsin absorbs photons, so, yes, retinas detect photons:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/93/2/560.full.pdf
I’m skeptical.
I believe that healthy skepticism is important. Not being an astrophysicist, and not even coming close to being able to understand their six papers published in the special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, I can’t really have an educated opinion. To me the picture is not convincing. Looks like so many other photos form space.
To tell you the truth, the way this was announced last week, coupled with the complete lack of any skepticism from experts and the language used (e.g. “forged through international collaboration”) really makes me question the claim.
I agree. Cosmology is completely corrupt as well.
I think if Mark had been alive when Newton published his “Principia,” he would have objected to that as well. Some people don’t like change or new things.
Jim
The LIGO results, as I understand it, are at least intriguing to the extent that they seem to confirm specific predictions from “Einstein based” gravity theory. Here are a couple of nice little YouTube videos from the fall of 2017 about the advanced level of corroboration that they think they have, on just where the gravitational waves are coming from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNfZ5qk_Pk8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRsRd4zH46U
Now, as for the “picture of a black hole”, I’m not sure myself that that is as significant.
I mean, it kind of looks like the proverbial painting of a “black bear in a coal mine”, don’t you think, ; ) !
Am I the only one who saw that it was in “M87” and for a brief moment thought they read “M78”? (answer: probably). Nebula M78 while belonging to the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex in real life, was the home of Ultraman in the classic 1960s Japanese TV series.
Hmmmm… Where and how big is it now?
From the caption:
“The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun. “
I am a fan of this kind of endeavour. I like the almost impossible nature of what is being attempted, yet people still work hard at doing it.
The question I would have asked if I had been in the press release room would be. Why if the object is three D are we able to have a view in two D that allows us a look at the shadow, through what would be the glowing event horizon.
Maybe I am missing some understanding of the science of black holes. Why is the ring photographed as a ring and only a ring, when it must be a sphere in actuality?.
It is almost like this is a cut plane of a 3d model. I was wondering that too. Maybe it is currently eating a nearby star; its luminosity ripped into an orbital disk.
It is a ring because the galaxy it is in the center of is a large, flat spiral with almost all the mass orbiting around it in a single plane. We see it as a ring because M87 is almost completely face on to us. This is one of the reasons this particular black hole was chosen.
The black hole itself will bend all the light around it into this disk so that it looks like it is facing us. Essentially, any light within 2.6 radius of the black hole will be curved around into a disk facing us. Everything within 2.6 radius will not show up.
There was a paper in 1986 that ran through all the calculations and said it would look just like this radio wave false colour image.
So, the M87 black hole is about one-quarter of the size of the central dark region from the photo and it is actually about the size of our solar system. Sagittarius A at the centre of our galaxy would be slightly larger than our Sun, so M87 is one of the biggest black holes in the universe.
Here is a video from yesterday which will show what is is going on. It takes awhile to get to ehe answer so you have to watch it until the end. It will make sense afterward.
Thanks. Good videos.
Black holes is a theory concocted from numbers that don’t add up , it is even worse than the Ptolemy solar system of crystal spheres holding the stars up on the sky but the cosmologists – they see a black hole under every rock
Homer see a donut
“numbers that don’t add up”
You need to show your work here. Where exactly is the flaw in Einstein’s theory of space-time?
Length, breadth, and width are the 3 dimensions of space. Time is a 4th dimension but it cannot coexist with the other dimensions because it isn’t in the same units. Time cannot be added to lengths. Einstein is also asking us to believe that you can bend space which consists of nothing. How can you bend something which doesnt exist? And don’t forget his math allowed the existence of wormholes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zWy6_Mog70
Stephen Crothers demolishes Special relativity
It’ s hard to sound like an Einstein “demolishing” genius with an Aussie accent.
If you don’t have anything more than high-school geometry as an argument you end up sounding like Monty Python’s Aussie philosophers.
” … and Bruce, here, is in charge of the sheep dip. “
All Crothers has demolished is any semblance of credibility, and he did that a long time ago. I will discuss this topic no longer if that’s all you have to offer. Sheep dip indeed.
As a kind of empirical debunking of some of the things that Crothers says in the video referenced, I would offer the following link, https://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae433.cfm, with the key paragraph there stating that:
“In October 1971, Hafele and Keating flew cesium-beam atomic clocks, initially synchronized with the atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., around the world both eastward and westward. After each flight, they compared the time on the clocks in the aircraft to the time on the clock at the Observatory. Their experimental data agreed within error to the predicted effects of time dilation. Of course, the effects were quite small since the planes were flying nowhere near the speed of light. ”
Now. bearing in mind that the above described verification of Einstein’s Special Relativity no doubt takes into account Einstein’s concept of synchronized systems of time keeping, plus* also* being no doubt based on Lorentz transformation as a basic principle, try to make sense then , of Crowther’s statements! The claim that he is making (both on a visual slide about 36 minutes into the video, as well as spoken by Crowther) is to say that “Einstein’s Clock Synchronization is Inconsistent With the Lorentz Transformation” – ?
As an ‘aside’ here, I note that I’ve read interesting things before, about alternative ways to look at or reassess Special Relativity. It is a matter of history, for instance, that Lorentz himself challenged what is usually called “Lorentz Invariance”, suggesting in discussions with Einstein that there might be a privileged “luminiferous ether-like special motion framework after all! In a similar spirit, later on, in 1959, the American physicist Tangherlini did his doctoral thesis on an advanced refinement of Lorentz’s “privileged framework” idea. In Tangherlini’s way of doing things, the whole concept of time dilation is handled somewhat differently compared to Einstein’s original treatment. Apparently, some people see practical benefits from this, such as making experimental results like the times recorded by atomic clocks on airplanes more intuitive to understand.
Now having mentioned that there might be a “clock tracking” benefit to such an “alternative” to Einstein, I had better cut right to the chase by also mentioning the well known fact that in particle accelerators particles travelling near the speed of light tend to “live longer” than a stationary particle (owing to the effect of relativistic time dilation). The advantage of Dr. Tangherlini’s approach to accounting for timings, is that if one wants, one can easily take the Earth as such to be a “privileged” system (at least approximately for some short period of time), while at the same time, we could look at an accelerated particle as “truly moving”. One then gets to regard time as being really “stretched out” or dilated for the moving particle in the accelerator. It is then intuitive to say that the particle would live longer or not decay so quickly, as being a truly fast moving object *under those particular assumptions*. In contrast, it is actually more difficult, in strictly “Einstein” terms, to visualize why the particle lives longer, since in Einstein’s original thesis, time is never really regarded as “stretched”. In “original” Einstein theory, everything has to be accounted for as being due to the particle going through different clock synchronizations as it whips around a circle (i.e., it is just conceptually more difficult, if you really want to do things the original “authentic Einstein” way). So it seems there *is* something to be said for certain alternative ways of developing relativity theory, and maybe this is what Crowther was reaching for in his video?
In any case, there is quite a difference between looking at clock synchronizations a *different way*, versus taking the Crowther approach of saying that “Clock Synchronization is Inconsistent” in Einstein’s theories! I am reminded of the time that someone told me that rocket motors obviously couldn’t work, since a rocket motor could obviously never throw enough stuff backward to make a huge spacecraft accelerate forward! In Crowther’s view, it seems that you can never really synchronize anyone’s clocks, since well, you just *can’t*, that’s why! I mean, back in 1971, someone really should have told Hafele and Keating that they were wasting their time trying to synchronize their atomic clocks? After all, Crowther’s view of Einstein’s work says that synchronizing is impossible?
>>
Time cannot be added to lengths.
<<
No, but when you multiply time by the speed-of-light you get a length.
Jim
Speed = distance/time.
Perhaps you mean vector of light?
>>
Speed = distance/time.
Perhaps you mean vector of light?
<<
No. You multiply a speed by time, and you get a length or distance. A vector simply adds a direction–which isn’t needed in this case.
Jim
Time is an emergent linear property of motion.
Space is described using a three coordinate system, X,Y,Z.
Motion is a change from point A to point B within that coordinate system.
Time is used to describe the rate of change of location within spacial coordinates using finely tuned oscillators to derive units.
Einstein linked time to motion.
As much as I like Einstein, space time is a really clumsy descriptor.
Paul Penrose
April 10, 2019 at 9:36 am
Where exactly is the flaw in Einstein’s theory of space-time?
————————
Just saying.
The “flaw in Einstein’s theory of space-time”, could exactly be shown when proving by “direct evidence” that
the absence of “space-time”
not only can be, but has being achieved by such “evidence”, by means of space time detection and
by the aid of space time instrumental sensors within the parameters and environment of space-time soup models running basically in the means of Newtonian space-time backbone physics.
How does this sounds for a space-time paradox??!!!
cheers
We are so small. Does anything we do really matter? Certainly puts climate change in perspective.
Quite interesting stuff. I was waiting for them to tell us it will be on a collision course with Earth unless we stop using fossil fuels!
I saw this quote in the Guardian. ” At the event horizon, light is bent in a perfect loop around the black hole, meaning if you stood there you would be able to see the back of your own head.”
I remember something similar after a long night of partying in my younger days 🙂
A first glimpse of a black hole accreation disk – stupendous science! This event is no longer on the horizon: “I see you!”
Funny how much this photo reminds me of the first photograph of individual atoms. A fuzzy blob of artificially colored light. Not sure how this will advance our knowledge of black holes but, congratulations.