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
From the M87* Wiki :
Observations suggest that the black hole may be displaced from the galactic center by about seven parsecs (23 light-years).[75] The displacement is in the opposite direction of the one-sided jet, which may indicate that the black hole was accelerated away by the jet.
Now that is one huge relativistic rocket motor. Imagine a 6 billion solar mass object accelerated by a plasma jet it itself generates! The Einstein field equations must be daunting – has anyone tried a solution for such a spacetime?
Singularities are el-cheapo solutions.
Here’s a quote from from a youtube comment about Sagiittarius A* by an astronomer from the Northolt Branch Observatories:
“Daniel Bamberger
20 hours ago
@mwk Given its temperature (millions of degrees), its spectrum in the visible range is almost flat, and so the visible light it emits is basically white (very bright white). The part moving towards us (the brighter part in the image) will be blue-shifted, but because of the very flat spectrum, it will not look bluer, just brighter.
So, TL;DR: It is white.”
Though to be fair, it is possible he is only talking about the color of a thin accretion disk, and the hole is still black, but I don’t think so.
I also found out on Wikipedia that the reason Sagittarius A* is not seen from earth in the visible spectrum is because it is obscured by much dust and such. I guess the stars seen orbiting it are outside the dust cloud, or are they also only detected in more penetrating wavelengths?
Also, Veritasium has admitted that the supposed image of Sagittarius A* is apparently not actually an image at all, but a simulation.
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I guess the stars seen orbiting it are outside the dust cloud, or are they also only detected in more penetrating wavelengths?
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Those stars are detected using infrared spectroscopy (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/430667).
The star labelled S2 has a semi-major axis of 970 au. It has an orbital period of roughly 16 years (30% longer than Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun), but gets no closer to Sgr A* than 120 au (about four times the orbital distance of Neptune from the Sun)–so S2 is really moving.
Jim
What is the confidence level?
Is that really a black hole?
Is it a photo or a computer generated image?
I’m skeptical. For good reasons.
“Tip of the hat to MIT’s Katie Bouman for her contribution to today’s big announcement!” wrote Planetary Society, which is led by Bill Nye.
https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2019/04/fans-want-a-rightful-seat-in-history-for-katie-bouman-who-created-an-algorithm-to-assemble-that-black-hole-photo.html
Strangelove Paradox
The Strangelove Paradox is that we are all inside a black hole but we are not spaghettified. This crazy paradox is easy to prove mathematically. The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return. If you fall inside the event horizon, you can no longer escape the black hole. The extreme tidal forces between your head and feet will stretch your body like spaghetti. Hence the name spaghettification. The event horizon is defined by the Schwarzschild radius (R):
R = 2 G M/c^2
Where: G is gravitational constant, M is mass of body, c is speed of light
Any massive body when compressed into a volume smaller than its Schwarzschild radius will turn into a black hole. For instance, to turn Earth into a black hole, you have to compress it into a small ball 0.88 cm in radius. What if you want to turn the observable universe into a black hole, how small do you have to compress it? The mass of ordinary matter plus dark matter in the observable universe is M = 1.1 E+54 kg
R = 2 G M/c^2 = 1.64 E+27 m
This is about 173 billion lightyears. Guess what? The radius of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion lightyears. It’s smaller than the Schwarzschild radius. Our universe is a giant black hole! We are all inside the event horizon!
So why are we not all walking spaghetti? Dark energy. This is a kind of anti-gravity. Not only does it prevent us from falling into the singularity, it also accelerates the expansion of space. Our universe is a black hole. The singularity is the Big Bang. In general relativity, space and time is a single entity called spacetime. So the singularity is separated from us not only in space but also in time. The Big Bang lies in our past.
In my Darkside Force theory, I derived the Cosmological Equations that govern the evolution of the universe. Solving these equations, I predict the universe will recollapse into the singularity. But that is another episode in a galaxy far, far away…
Simply put, black holes do NOT exist.
How could they, considering that the mathematical equation used to theorise their existence has been proven faulty?
I hate to rain on people’s parades but that looks like an Electromagnetic torus with glow plasma rotating around the electric field.
Indeed.