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
Interesting that M87’s SM black hole was the target. I’d guess that’s because of its huge size (and big accretion disk) and that M87 has little gas & dust hiding its center.
Next up is a time travel project to back and show Einstein the photo along with the plot of gravitational wave detection.
Since for every action there is a reaction, consider a photon being subjected to acceleration due to a gravitational force. Since it cannot exceed the speed of light, the reaction would be that the photon would increase in energy. This would possibly cause a “brightening” as the photon approached the event horizon.
Photon can’t accelerate — it’s already going at the speed of light.
When a photon (light) passes through a transparent medium such as air, water, or glass, it slows down. That’s what causes light to refract. When it passes out of such mediums it speeds up. Mathematically, you could call that acceleration.
A photon leaving a large gravitational field would lose energy. That loss is reflected as a red shift. Photons lose energy trying to escape from large masses.
Jim
I never doubted the existence of black holes, and this surely looks like the effects that one would create. By definition you CAN’T photograph (at any spectrum) a black hole, only the stuff being impacted around it.
BUT. I have always rejected the idea of a singularity. Until they come up with tests to determine a black hole is or is not a singularity, its just confirming that black holes exist, but not their structure (if any).
For example, one characteristic of a black hole is angular momentum, but a singularity can’t have angular momentum, therefore it can’t be a singularity. We eventually will be able to explain how matter is compressed into some type of exotic structure that is not a point – until then everything past (or perhaps just on) the event horizon is just guesswork and calling it a singularity is the same as saying “we have no idea”.
Now THAT (the structure of) will be interesting.
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BUT. I have always rejected the idea of a singularity.
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One way to look at it is that it takes an infinite amount of time to form a black hole singularity because of time dilation. So from our viewpoint, no singularity has yet formed. And from the viewpoint of matter falling into the black hole, the black hole will evaporate (due to Hawking radiation) long before it reaches the actual singularity.
Jim
“In order to reconstruct the brightness distribution of an observed source, VLBI requires cross-correlation between the individual signals recorded independently at each station, brought to a common time reference using local atomic clocks paired with the Global Positioning System (GPS) for coarse synchronization. The resulting complex correlation coefficients need to be calibrated for residual clock and phase errors, and then scaled to physical flux density units using time-dependent and station-specific sensitivity estimates. Once this process is completed, further analysis in the image domain can refine the calibration using model-dependent self-calibration techniques”
“At the calibration stage, instrumental and environmental gain systematics are estimated and removed from the data so that a smaller and simpler data product can be used for source model fitting at a downstream analysis stage.”
“The correlation coefficient may vary with both time and frequency. For FX correlators, signals from each antenna are first taken to the frequency domain using temporal Fourier transforms on short segments (F), and then pair-wise correlated (X). The expectation values in Equation (1) are calculated by averaging over time–frequency volumes”
In short this is not an image of a black hole but an assemblage of complex mathematical calculations obtained from electronic signal processing, put together to give a time aggregated ‘electro-mathematical visualization diagram’ of what that particular part of Galaxy might look like.
p.s I abandoned using FT number of decades ago, since you get out far more than you bargain for.
“an assemblage of complex mathematical calculations obtained from electronic signal processing”
That would be an accurate description of a digital photograph, CAT scan, or an electron microscope image. I’m not saying that just because all those things are considered “real” images that this black hole image must also be real, but it does leave your criticism sounding hollow. I think a healthy skeptical attitude would be to accept it as “real” for now, but keep an open mind about it and be willing to evaluate new data as it becomes available.
Exactly, a famous Mark Twain quote about science comes to mind.
As far as the ‘Grand Scientific Pronouncements’ are concerned my favourite one goes something like this:
“When a hen has just laid an ordinary egg she cackles as if she has laid an asteroid” -MT
Mark Twain was a brilliant satirist, and had a wickedly sharp sense of humor, but I wouldn’t necessarily live my life by his “philosophy”. Nor would I let it guide my scientific explorations. Quoting him at a party does make one sound clever though.
Well, yes and no.
I suppose it might have saved us from the black holes cognitive dissonance , if your relative (?) Roger spent more time doodling with his triangles and have not bothered with the dying stars gravitational collapse calculations and the sanity challenging singularities, with Hawking might have been the city’s financial wiz kid, but it wasn’t to be.
Funny, looks like our Federal Government.
Proof Positive it IS a black Hole
A [visual] model inferred from signals of assumed/asserted fidelity is the foundation of modern science. It is “consistent with”, in a universal frame of reference, perhaps. I would leave it to philosophy, and at least wait until we approach the edge of our solar system, in order to observe, replicate, and deduce in proximity to the objects of our affection.
Color me unconvinced.
It’s a photo of a fantasy.
Do you feel my dark energy?
Here is a short video, published just yesterday, which explains generally how the image was made.
Of interest is the 1960’s manually ray traced drawing of a black hole which is strikingly similar to the image produced by the EHT.
Michael Mann had a comment about this on twitter, whining that science could accomplish this feat but can’t seemingly fix global warming – an excellent response followed.
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/04/10/that-was-good-cuffymeh-explains-to-agw-alarmist-michael-mann-why-scientists-arent-doing-more-to-tackle-climate-change/
Oh! That is a beautiful bit of linguistic jujitsu!
Great play on the Giant Sucking Sound used by various candidates!
LOL!
Well they can’t “fix” global warming if they think reducing CO2 with change anything. When they get beyond that obsession, they may at least start to understand a little more.
Now you just run along and go polish your Nobel “Peace” Prize.
Oh what, you don’t have one any more. How did that happen?
Mann only got the “piece” prize since he had to share it with hundreds of other people.
So what is this image actually supposed to represent. Clearly it is not the light coming from a black hole since by definition, there is none.
I could possibly accept that it is the light of two stars behind a black being distorted by gravitational lensing.
Apparently that is the radiation given off by matter and energy that is swirling around the event horizon faster and faster as it is all swallowed by the black hole.
So refreshing to see scientists and engineers doing actual technology development and discovery.
These images brought tears to my eyes.
Made me laugh too !
from the press release: resolution “… enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris.”
Yeah right , if you can look around corners.
Dont forget about the curvature either.
BUT
As the Airline Flies, it is 3623 miles from NY NY (WTC) to Paris (Louvre) so you could be at 3623 miles altitude and not be concerned with corners or curvature issues.
I was accounting for curvature, exactly my point. They specifically said “from a sidewalk café in Paris.”
Maybe they should have stuck to converting to football fields.
“Yeah right , if you can look around corners.”
with a femto second camera you can see around corners
so I guess they meant:
“… enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris…. with a femto second camera ”.
silly of me not have realised that.
No what they meant was pretty clear.
Only someone on the spectrum would try to literalize the metaphorical expression.
In other places they expressed the extreme resolution by saying “seeing a golfball on the moon”
I suppose your response would be there are no golfballs on the moon.
the PURPOSE of the comparison “reading a paper from X distance” or seeing a golfball on the moon, is Not to be technically or literally accurate, but rather to express to the laymen
the extreme nature of the resolution required.
They could have just presented the trig required to be literally accurate, but then 99.9% of the readers would not get the basic MEANING. the basic meaning is “extreme precision”
spot a golfball on the moon type precision, read a paper in NYC from paris type precision.
These analogies are not intended to be literally accurate. the ONLY people who read them
literally are.
1. people INTENT on disagreeing.
2. mental defectives who are on the spectrum who dont get figurative language.
( akin to the the earth is 6000 years old types..because genesis is a literal story)
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I suppose your response would be there are no golfballs on the moon.
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I believe Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard left one golf ball on the moon.
Jim
May be we misunderstand cosmos and spiral rotating galaxies
https://www3.amherst.edu/~gsgreenstein/progs/animations/spiral_galaxy/
Now, let’s take a look closer to home at the solar Parker spiral
Two animations look remarkably similar, but we know that the Parker spiral is created by the sun throwing stuff out and not absorbing it.
May be we got s.c. ‘black holes’ wrong way around, perhaps they are just 0 deg K ‘black lumps’ remnants of a previous dead universe giving a birth to ours. Hmm…. no BB, that would be too radical to demolish both, the BB and BHs, killing two birds with one stone./sarc
The spiral galaxy “animation” is a model. Note how the model makes the centre rotate much faster than the outside. A big problem with the gravity model is that this is not what happens in most spiral galaxies. The outside turns at about the same angular velocity.
They then start doing all sorts of arbitrary ad hoc juggling with large and improbably placed loads of mass .
This kind of fudging is usually a pretty sure indication you going down the wrong path and instead of frigging the model you need to rethink it.
as far as I understand the image
is just one of many (perhaps the thousands) produced by the super-computers from the ‘processed’ radio-telescopes data, and chosen as the nearest approximation to what a hypothetical black hole calculations suggest.
If so, I think the science team concerned should publish an on line album of the alternative images produced; total transparency is required.
Your understanding is incorrect. Think of taking a digital image and randomly displaying pixels slowly, interpolating the missing pixels. At first you wouldn’t know what the image was, but as more and more pixels are added, it would slowly resolve into something recognizable. This is basically what they did, so looking at the intermediate images wouldn’t tell you anything more than the final image; actually less.
“interpolating the missing pixels”
So it appears is yours too.
Imaging process (not that I understood most of it) is described in detail here
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85/meta
these are visual representations of data
“We then reconstructed images from all M87 and synthetic data sets using all possible parameter combinations on a coarse grid in the space of these parameters. We chose large ranges for each parameter, deliberately including values that we expected to produce poor reconstructions.”
“In Figure 10, we test whether or not our parameter selection procedure leads to reconstructed images that are unduly similar to the training set. In this test, we repeat the parameter selection process after withholding a specified geometric source model from the training set. For example, in Figure 10, the parameter combinations used to produce the images of the disk model were determined by selecting the best-performing parameters on only the ring, crescent, and double. Despite excluding the disk from the training set, all three pipelines produce an image with a disk morphology that does not resemble any of the other images in the training set.”
etc, etc.
What you quoted there is a technical discussion of the interpolation algorithms. It was not a simple matter since each telescope had different properties (size, receiver sensitivity, etc.), so combining them was complex. I haven’t dug into their methodology, so I don’t know how accurate it is in reconstructing the actual image, but from my experience (as a Software/Firmware Engineer of 35+ years) I realize that advanced image processing algorithms are pretty much PFM to most people. So I suppose a certain level of extra skepticism is to be expected. I just think it’s interesting that they don’t have that same level of skepticism about CAT scans or self-driving cars which are nearly on the same level of complexity.
The representation and accompanying explanation of why it is represented the way it is are no surprise to me as they confirm a suspicion of mine formulated without the knowledge of similar by others that “black holes” and “dark matter” are essentially the same thing on vastly different scales (of energy and apparent size) where the only force that matters is gravity and the only thing that exists in the “hole” is information contained by the objects rendered massless as they seem to pass through the “hole”.
I suspect is an excellent representation of the most basic, ubiquitous form of matter in the universe.
Imagine a doughnut twisting into itself so wildly that it looks like a doughnut no matter which way you view it. Half of it seems to be twisting away from you with half twisting towards you. The hold is always in direct view. This “doughnut” is an object because it is not information.
Why is this phenomenom named a ‘black hole’ ; the black I can understand but ‘hole’ just seems to lead to confusions such as passing thru’or entering the same. In fact these objects (if they are such) are surely the antithesis of a hole, being matter of such great density and mass that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull
Looks like a Torus. It may be a Plasmoid.
From Wikipedia.
The word plasmoid was coined in 1956 by Winston H. Bostick (1916-1991) to mean a “plasma-magnetic entity”:[8]
The plasma is emitted not as an amorphous blob, but in the form of a torus. We shall take the liberty of calling this toroidal structure a plasmoid, a word which means plasma-magnetic entity. The word plasmoid will be employed as a generic term for all plasma-magnetic entities.
Why are the columnar high energy projections which span hundreds of thousands of light years and appear to be entering , and/ or leaving the “Black Hole” only (visible ? observable ? detectable ? ) when viewed from a point perpendicular to these streams ? Why do the streams not dissipate , or disperse in all directions ? Given all else equal , does a “Black Hole ” “appear” the same from all possible angles of observation ? If these high energy projections are confined by “magnetic fields ” , what else besides electric fields , or moving charges(Plasma) could cause, or maintain these magnetic fields ? Recently, by a somewhat similar process , the reconstructed image of our Sun’s North and South pole were for the first time visualized . Does anyone know why our Sun’s North and South poles have never been directly imaged ? ie a probe orbiting from above ?
I think it’s fair to call this black hole image fake. I believe it was based on real sensor data of a real supermassive object, but the representation of the data is so deceptive as to qualify as fake. The problem is that I don’t think black holes appear black from a distance. Astronomers have stated that black holes are surrounded all around by plasma falling in, and not just in the accretion disk. I don’t think you can see the black through the bright glowing exterior. It may be that in the wavelength used to gather this data, some of the matter farther from the middle is hotter, but the middle should be glowing in the image as well. It looks like they just turned down the brightness like they do to make sunspots appear dark, even though sunspots are actually glowing quite brightly. But then if they had published a picture of the black hole that looked like a normal star, just with a little brighter outer ring, then it wouldn’t be black, or look like a hole. People would just look perplexed and say, nothing to see here, move along. But I don’t think that is any excuse to be deceptive about it.
Sorry Frank, operative word is “accretion disk”. It’s real.
https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_blackholes_event.html
In the future this period of history will be known as era of fake discoveries , The fake bozon , fake gravitational waves detection, fake gravitational lensing , now fake black hole picture . All nothing but computer
generated models and animations , presented by very small groups of insiders inaccessible to outsiders unverifiable and undebunk-able
for the time being
Hmmm….. I thought a “black hole” would look like any other star, but dimmer, and with an accretion disk and polar jets.
Consider this video by the European Southern Observatory Organization at 13min36sec https://youtu.be/omz77qrDjsU?t=816
Notice the accretion disk is thicker than the black hole, covering it from all angles, and is glowing. And notice the graphic at 13min55sec showing the photons all round going in all directions. They then point out how the light passing close is bent, but they don’t mention that the light emitted by the plasma in a direction straight away from the hole, from well outside the event horizon, will go straight away to the observer, or maybe nearly so. It might be dimmer than the bunch of light that comes around the edge, but it should still be visible, not black.
Did I miss something in your link that said the only visible radiation was from the accretion disk?
man I would hate to see what commenters say about pictures from Armstrong landing on the moon.
I agree.
How about pictures of Armstrong winning the Tour De France?
A few points need to be repeatedly made.
Einstein never liked Schwarzschild’s solution implying a mathematical singularity. His famous water sphere argument is pure genius.
There are massive dense objects apparently at the “center” of every galaxy, proporional to the galaxy mass – no one knows how or why.
Our galactic central object is amazingly quiet, no “accretion disk” – orbits of 27 stars about it are directly observed. But huge perpendicular 50,000lyr jets (gamma spectrum) seem to sprout there.
Hawking’s 2014 paper shows there are no black holes, at most chaotic “ephemeral” horizons – this leans towards Einstein’s argument that no change would be possible if time actually stopped, but from the QM world. A kind of QM convergence with General Relativity.
Hawking also dismissed the famous “firewall” argument in that paper, and the idea of a radiating horizon.
And another thing – even Kip Thorne got the image of the black hole in the famous movie Interstellar, Gargantua, wrong. There should me massive redshifting of any photons near the horizon.
Not sure if gravitational redshifting is accounted for by EHT, but maybe the mm range is already a seriously redshifted image.
M87 is not a spiral like ours, rather an elliptical. The wiki has lots of stuff as well as the EHT results.
I am reading multiple sources which state that:
in elliptical galaxies, there is 0 Net Spin Angular Momentum. They do not rotate.
If so, where would the spin of an accretion disc (Kerr solution) come from? How do you shoehorn a rotating Black Hole into a non-rotating galaxy?
If elliptical galaxies are formed from collisions with spiral galaxies, then the next question should be: “where does the spin come from in spiral galaxies?”
Also, a spinning black hole drags the space that is near it around too. I believe all rotating masses do that–it’s called frame dragging.
The accretion disk would then be confined to the original rotation of the black hole.
If the planets formed from the Solar accretion disk, then it becomes a problem for astronomers to explain the axial tilt or obliquity of the planets. The Sun’s obliquity is more than 7 degrees. That, too, needs an explanation–why isn’t it zero?
The obliquity of other stars to their planetary systems can sometime be determined. It’s usually near zero–like the Sun–but not always.
Jim
Thanks for your use of the word ‘if’. It is critically important to remember.
With the advent of this new radio telescope technology, Black Hole (I prefer the term Dark Star) cosmology will make the much needed transition from mathematical speculation to observational speculation. I am looking forward to the frequent use of the word ‘unexpectedly’ with regard to new observations, much as with the Hubble and the Chandra telescopes, as we try to reconcile observations with theory. Especially when optical, x-ray, and radio observations present conflicts and paradoxes.
Galactic center “black hole” masses are only a small fraction of the total mass. Our case is 4 million solar masses v. 300 billion. M87 is some such ratio maybe 6 billion v. 600 billion – worth checking.
So applying Kepler’s laws is very questionable at galactic scales. Solar system ratios are like 98% sun v. 2% planetary, totally opposite.
It’s likely that this maths lurch produced the need for “dark matter” to explain rotation curves.
Interestingly EHT did not look at our local center because of dust. Yet we know exactly the mass from 27 orbiting stars , and no accretion disk, very quiet. Our recently observed 50,000lyr jets are another story. So no super hot spinning disk, yet massive gamma active jets? Will EHT go there or not?
No accretion disk or no disk easily visible from this distance? It might be dim on a cosmic scale, but maybe still appear bright if you were up close. Both of the released pictures show something glowing around the hole, at least at that frequency. I think that glow has to be pretty bright to be observable at all at this distance. The question is whether the hole is actually as dark as their image makes it appear.