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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.
That's all true. Shep Doeleman did say however, during the question/answer session at 1:12:21, that they can see the event horizon of Sagittarius A and should be able to resolve it which they will shortly begin working on. But he wasn't promising anything.
An interesting thing that I heard answered at the press conference was that this image isn’t as fuzzy as it seems. I guess this black hole looks like that naturally, if I got it right.
An interesting thing that I heard answered at the press conference was that this image isn’t as fuzzy as it seems. I guess this black hole looks like that naturally, if I got it right.
Avery Broderick (the panel scientist second from the right and one who spoke just before your timestamp) gave a lecture last year at the Perimeter Institute on black holes and this project. It's really interesting and pretty accessible even if you don't have any background in cosmology. I highly recommend it.
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!
In other words, if you placed that black hole where the sun is, it would easily engulf the entire solar system and then some. It's huge.
Pluto's orbital radius ranges from 4.4 to 7.4 billion km from the sun depending on where it is in its orbital cycle.
An interesting thing that I heard answered at the press conference was that this image isn’t as fuzzy as it seems. I guess this black hole looks like that naturally, if I got it right.
I don’t think we’ve had this much activity on the space forum in a long time.
Impressed with the results. Here’s hoping we’ll eventually get Sag A*.
What really blows my mind is the fact that it’s got a Schwarzchild radius of 40 billion km, which would put it well beyond many Kuiper Belt objects if it were placed where the Sun is.
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