Using radio-telescopes all over the World together, filtered by supercomputers, Astrophysicists have managed to pull in a picture of the event horizon of a massive Black Hole! This is a first, but people, including this since sour are distorting what is on this picture. Since by definition nothing escapes from a Black Hole, everything we see can only be from outside the Black Hole.
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Seeing one “is a Herculean task,” she said.
Image from article:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-first-picture-event-horizon-telescope?utm_source=Editors_Picks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorspicks041419
Write up on black hole picture:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-first-picture-event-horizon-telescope?utm_source=Editors_Picks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorspicks041419
Now this article claims it has a picture of an actual Black Hole, when what Physics allows is that we see the massive energy output of matter in close orbit, that is falling into this gravity well. It is an IMPRESSIVE picture It is not, however a picture of a Block Hole! It is a picture of the event horizon around this mass that is too large to let anything escape.
EHT is an Event Horizon Telescope in this quote:
The much-anticipated big reveal of the image “lives up to the hype, that’s for sure," says Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, who is not on the EHT team. "It really brings home how fortunate we are as a species at this particular time, with the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the universe, to have built all the science and technology to make it happen."
Here is an article on the EHT:
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
From the article above:
"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."
This is a Huge step forward in radio astronomy!
The supermassive beast lies in a galaxy called M87 more than 50 million light-years away!
Not bad for a branch of Science that is just over 50 years old! They had to create a new set of tools and unprecedented agreements of cooperation for radio-telescopes all over the planet. By synchronizing the outputs of all these radio-telescopes, and using massive computerized noise filtering to achieve a first time photograph of something no one can ever see! This picture of an accretion disk is the first time Scientists have been able to capture physical evidence of an actual Block Hole. This was anticipated by Albert Einstein's Theory of General relativity, and this picture supports his theory!
It took a radio-telescope the size of the entire World, run by several hundred dedicated people; to produce this picture, and to support Einstein's Theory of Relativity. But most important, it has opened up our view of the Universe, just a little more! It also brings us closer to a Unified Field Theory, which is the Holy Grail of Science!
The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.
They intend to bring in more radio-Telescopes; which will increase resolution, and distance ability. This picture will make that a lot easier, because it is now proven functional! Hopefully, they will have a lot of new locations signing on soon, since they have been successful, in such a stunning way! This is a HUGE Scientific leap, and will take years to figure out all the ramifications of this massive influx of information; but it WILL change existing perceptions in modern science!.
This is like Christopher Columbus coming to America, or the first Atom Bomb; it will change Scientific History and ripple for centuries!