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I can’t wait. The lensing effect we see around the EH should give us a more accurate idea of black holes’ mass and gravitational fields.
Hopefully it’s a good picture!
Does anyone know if they were looking to photograph the supermassive black hole in Saggittarius A or were they combing the general sky looking for any black holes?
I can’t wait. The lensing effect we see around the EH should give us a more accurate idea of black holes’ mass and gravitational fields.
Hopefully it’s a good picture!
Does anyone know if they were looking to photograph the supermassive black hole in Saggittarius A or were they combing the general sky looking for any black holes?
Apparently, both SgrA* at the center of the Milky Way and M87 in the center of the Virgo A galaxy have been the focus of the EHT collaboration.
The EHT is an international collaboration that has formed to continue the steady long-term progress on improving the capability of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at short wavelengths in pursuit of this goal. This technique of linking radio dishes across the globe to create an Earth-sized interferometer, has been used to measure the size of the emission regions of the two supermassive black holes with the largest apparent event horizons: SgrA* at the center of the Milky Way and M87 in the center of the Virgo A galaxy. In both cases, the sizes match that of the predicted silhouette caused by the extreme lensing of light by the black hole. Addition of key millimeter and submillimeter wavelength facilities at high altitude sites has now opened the possibility of imaging such features and sensing the dynamic evolution of black hole accretion. The EHT project includes theoretical and simulation studies that are framing questions rooted at the black hole boundary that may soon be answered through observations. [Bolding mine]
I guess the reason that this is such a big deal is that it will, amongst other things, test out Einstein’s theory of relativity in the ultimate strong gravity environment. So there is a possibility that tomorrow’s announcement could upend Einstein’s theory. I’m not sure what the bookmakers odds are on that occurring but it’s damn cool anyways. Either Einstein’s theory will hold up or it won’t. I’m probably going to be late to the Einstein is wrong party... but we’ll see soon enough.
This video explains it quite well what is to be uncovered at tomorrow’s multiple press conferences:
I guess the reason that this is such a big deal is that it will, amongst other things, test out Einstein’s theory of relativity in the ultimate strong gravity environment. So there is a possibility that tomorrow’s announcement could upend Einstein’s theory. I’m not sure what the bookmakers odds are on that occurring but it’s damn cool anyways. Either Einstein’s theory will hold up or it won’t. I’m probably going to be late to the Einstein is wrong party... but we’ll see soon enough.
This video explains it quite well what is to be uncovered at tomorrow’s multiple press conferences:
Amazing. It looks like a donut with orange icing. It took a tremendous amount of effort to achieve that image. And we now know that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds up under extreme gravitational conditions.
This is the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. I hope they have as much success with imaging Sagittarius A at our own Milky Way's center.
Amazing. It looks like a donut with orange icing. It took a tremendous amount of effort to achieve that image. And we now know that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds up under extreme gravitational conditions.
This is the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. I hope they have as much success with imaging Sagittarius A at our own Milky Way's center.
The black hole in Sag A is harder to capture because it's much smaller and has more material in the way. They mentioned that eventually they will try and get a Sag A pic. M87 is MASSIVE. More info below.
The image also provides a new measurement of the black hole’s size and heft. “Our mass determination by just directly looking at the shadow has helped resolve a longstanding controversy,” Sera Markoff, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Estimates made using different techniques have ranged between 3.5 billion and 7.22 billion times the mass of the sun. But new the EHT measurements show that its mass is about 6.5 billion solar masses.
The team has also determined the behemoth’s size — its diameter stretches 38 billion kilometers — and that the black hole spins clockwise. “M87 is a monster even by supermassive black hole standards,” Sera said.
EHT trained its sights on both M87’s black hole and Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But, it turns out, it was easier to image M87’s monster. That black hole is more than 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, about 2,000 times as far as Sgr A*. But it’s also about 1,000 times as massive as the Milky Way’s giant, which weighs the equivalent of roughly 4 million suns. That extra heft nearly balances out M87’s distance. “The size in the sky is pretty darn similar,” says EHT team member Feryal Özel.
Last edited by Diesel350z; 04-10-2019 at 08:37 AM..
The team has also determined the behemoth’s size — its diameter stretches 38 billion kilometers — and that the black hole spins clockwise. “M87 is a monster even by supermassive black hole standards,” Sera said.
Yeah, I saw the press conference live on YouTube, I highly recommend it to everybody, even if you aren't a science geek, and remember the guy from the University of Waterloo mentioning that the black hole pictured was about 1 and a half light days wide and did a quick calculation, knowing a light day is 26 billion km, so 1 and a half would be ~39 billion km wide or 24 billion miles wide!
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