First ever photograph of a "Black Hole" revealed today

Wow...50 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY.  Took 8 telescopes coordinated around the world to capture image.

I call BS.  Looks like an out-of-focus Halloween Jack-O-Lantern shot through a lens smeared with Vaseline.

Little perspective, because humans really can't comprehend the distance and scale involved of the cosmos.

The moon is 1.3 light SECONDS away from earth. The black hole is 50 million light YEARS away. 

What that means is the light the photograph captured has been traveling from the event horizon since shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct, before we, as a species, were even a twinkling in some small mammals eyes. 

No, it's not going to be pretty and CGI-riffic because our technology is barely equivalent to putting film in a camera box and shining a flashlight through it at that sort of range, especially since it was taken through the atmosphere. 

I thought light cannot escape a black hole?  Or is that bs?

Let us not forget that this "photograph" is actually a compilation and interpretation of data in the radio spectrum, gathered by an array of radio telescopes, not optical telescopes.

Lof8 said:

I thought light cannot escape a black hole?  Or is that bs?

It can't. This is the light running from us towards the event horizon, which is greater than the diameter of our entire Solar system (Neptune's orbit)...

Eye of Sauron E36 M3.

In reply to Lof8 :

Not a physicist but this is what I have read.

Light cannot escape past the event horizon of a black hole.  The event horizon is the point of no return - anything that passes that point would have to exceed the speed of light to escape, which is impossible - Star Trek aside.   As matter accelerates toward the black hole, it is heated to the point it glows. 

That glow is what is being recorded in this image.

In reply to Lof8 :

The event horizon is the boundary around a black hole at which gravity from the mass of the black hole prevents light from escaping. The light just outside the event horizon is able to escape the gravitational pull, so we are able to "see" that, as stated with non-optical instruments. 

So really this is not a black hole or a photograph. To see the black hole, you would have to be beyond the event horizon looking out and to be a photograph it would need to depict light. Nice try though.

Does matter ever actually pass the event horizon or does it just keep getting closer on an infinite scale?

First photo of a black hole for sale on Craigslist. 

Swamp gas...

Appleseed said:

First photo of a black hole for sale on Craigslist. 

I was going to make a similar comment. Bravo!

The glow around it is a combination of the matter orbiting in the accretion disc it at near light speed and the photons (light) orbiting it.  The accretion disc will appear has a full halo because of all the light bending going on.  The brighter spots are caused by the orbiting light heading towards the viewer.  There is a lot of weird stuff going on near a black hole.

Very good explanation here:

Please, that's no black hole.  It's someone's colonoscopy picture who just was using too much hot sauce....

So,   What can we use this for?   How can it affect Earth?

Grtechguy said:

So,   What can we use this for?   How can it affect Earth?

Well, it's confirmed predictions made with our current best physics theories, including a meaningful addition to the evidence that black holes actually exist. Which is actually kind of disappointing, because advances in science are made when we find that our best understanding isn't quite right, but it's useful. Also the global array of radio telescopes that created the picture represents a big advancement in radio astronomy. You'd have to make some far-future speculations to try to guess at what the practical applications would be...Einstein never guessed that his theories on relativity could lead to GPS, and Thomas Young never guessed that the double-slit experiment would lead to quantum computing and communication. Black holes could theoretically be used as an energy source.

Amazing. I wish I spent more time keeping up with modern science.

Appleseed said:

First photo of a black hole for sale on Craigslist. 

Link?

So, that is not a photograph to start with, but I want to watch the video Aircooled posted above. Besides the distances involved which are really too big for my mind to comprehend, the whole idea of black holes is interesting. It is hard to comprehend how far away Saturn is, much less another star, and then this black hole is even farther. Mind blowing.

That 'photo' is not that much more of a photo of a black hole than this one that I saw in 1979.

It's not a photograph, but it is a radiograph, much like a medical X-ray

In reply to aircooled :

That was a good video and answered one of my questions.

T.J. said:

That 'photo' is not that much more of a photo of a black hole than this one that I saw in 1979.

 

Except that it's based on actual electromagnetic radiation from a real object, not a drawing on some glass in a movie studio.

What this image does tell us though is that we were pretty damn close in guessing what they'd look like from afar. 

Very true.  If you watch that video I linked, that was recorded BEFORE the image was released. His (sciences) guess at what it will look like is very close to the actual image.