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u/X-ision Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 10 '19
Additional information regarding this black hole for those who are interested in this amazing piece of space porn:
- The hole measures 40 billion km across (that's 3 million times the size of the Earth).
- The black hole was found in a galaxy called Messier 87 Galaxy (or M87) and is larger than the size of our entire Solar System.
- It is 500 million trillion km away (approx. 55 million light years away).
- The image was photographed by a network of eight telescopes situated around the world.
- It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
(Source: BBC)
Edit: Thank you kind strangers for my first ever Reddit silver and platinum. Much obliged.
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u/Icommentoncrap Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 11 '19
Additional unnecessary information
• The hole measures 40 Billion kilometers across which is the length of 437,440,000,000 football fields and assuming you take a step and it is one foot it will take you 113,200,000,000,000 steps to walk across and since people are telling me that no one walks foot to foot if we decide that a step is about a yard or 3 feet we get 37,773,333,300,000 steps to walk across
• 500 million trillion kilometers is 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 and that would take you 1,640,419,995,000,000,000,000,000 steps if you felt inclined on walking there and if you wanna take yard steps and not walk with one foot in front of the other right on out the door you get 546,806,670,000,000,000,000,000 big boi steps
• Eight telescopes is eight more than I have
• The mass of 6,500,000,000 times the weight of the sun (1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg) is about 12,928,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms which is about
-11,777,395,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chickens (bout 2 pounds each)
-2,591,133,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 elephants (11,000 pounds per big boi)
-208,524,190,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 humans (137 pounds because that's what Google said)
-or about one OP's mom
• I have no life and am bored on a bus trip
• black holes are cool
• If a mini cooper weighs about 3000 pounds or 1360.777 kilograms and the black hole weighs 12,928,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms then that would mean that about 9,500,454,520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mini coopers equal the weight of this black hole
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u/X-ision Apr 10 '19
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, friend. This information was quite life altering!
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u/Icommentoncrap Apr 10 '19
It's the little things that keep me going. I hope you pack a big backpack for when you walk to the black hole
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u/X-ision Apr 10 '19
I'll be packing my shit into a Space-Tesla.
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u/Carbon_FWB Apr 10 '19
That's a long time to have to hold onto the damn steering wheel...
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u/sponge_welder Apr 10 '19
Yeah I'm gonna need that mass in units of mini coopers or this documentary is useless
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u/Icommentoncrap Apr 10 '19
Aight my dude. If a mini cooper weighs about 3000 pounds or 1360.777 kilograms and the black hole weighs 12,928,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms then that would mean that about 9,500,454,520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mini coopers equal the weight of this black hole
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u/Consequence6 Apr 10 '19
If your stride is 3 feet, and you're making 2 strides each second, it'll take you just under 600,000 years to run from one side to another. For context, 600,000 years ago was slightly after we discovered how to make stone tools.
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u/alcoholic_astronomer Apr 10 '19
Tagging onto this with more unnecessary information: That black hole has a diameter of 0.0000165 arcseconds in our night sky. In comparison the moon is 1860. If you took a dime and held it up in front of you so it looked about as big as the moon, this black hole would look slightly smaller than a single silver atom on that dime.
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u/sliceofamericano Apr 10 '19
If you combined the number of telescopes you have with the number of telescopes I have, and then added an additional 8 telescopes, It would be equivalent to the number of telescopes it took to take this picture..
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u/bemore_ Apr 10 '19
Thank you. I feel like instead of trying to say a number with 18 digits we could just say "18 of your moms" so that kids can picture the magnitude
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Apr 10 '19
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u/X-ision Apr 10 '19
Our solar system is situated in the galactic plane of the Milky Way galaxy, meaning that upon looking towards the centre of the galaxy our view is obstructed by billions of other solar systems between us and the black hole. The positioning and rotation of Sagittarius A and Messier 87 made them prime (and relatively close) galaxies for a clear view of their centres as compared to our closest neighbour, Andromeda.
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u/mangeek Apr 10 '19
Yep. We're on the edge, so looking in means we see a lot of noise overlaying the core: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-s-journey-to-the-center-of-our-galaxy/
M87 is rather diffuse compared to the Milky Way, and the black hole in its core is 6.4 BILLION solar masses compared to the 4.1 MILLION solar masses of ours, or about 1,500 times as massive.
All we see from ours is a few stars that seem to orbit something way too quickly. The one in M87 is a monster eating 90 Earths' worth of mass a day.
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u/Time2kill Apr 10 '19
The one in M87 is a monster eating 90 Earths' worth of mass a day.
Of all the number and facts that i read today, this one is the one that really put me down on the scale of things. Jesus, we are nothing but star dust.
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Apr 10 '19 edited Jun 16 '19
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u/Froot-Loop-Dingus Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 10 '19
Sag A is in our galaxy. It is the arm of the spiral galaxy we reside in.
Edit: The Milky Way Galaxy
Edit 2: I was misinformed. For anyone else interested in learning more this is Sagittarius A*
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u/LeCrushinator Apr 10 '19
Sagittarius is an arm of the Milky Way. Sagittarius A* is the name of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
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u/Tengam15 Apr 10 '19
For those wondering just how big that black hole is, take a map of our solar system. Take Neptune’s orbit, the farthest out from the sun and therefore the largest. Neptune’s orbit is 7 million kilometres in diameter.
Now, picture a single object almost six times as large as that orbit. That’s how big that black hole is.
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u/hamberduler Apr 10 '19
There's like, 6 ops mom jokes in there. Please tell them to yourselves, and then upvote as if I bothered to write them out.
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Apr 10 '19
Must have been a big fucking star then
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u/hungrymutherfucker Apr 10 '19
Not sure if you're trolling but the original star would only need to be 20 solar masses, it would grow through eating gas and stars
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u/strib666 Apr 10 '19
There is actually a lot of uncertainty about how supermassive black holes form and it is an active area of research. Starting with a stellar-mass black hole and just growing through accretion doesn't really work well because it's hard to have enough matter, within a small enough volume, for the black hole to grow to billions of solar masses in size.
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u/Aesthetics_Supernal Apr 10 '19
So if what we are seeing is 55Myr Old, what do we do to try to understand what it may look like/be doing right now, 55Myrs later.
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u/KnightOfWords Apr 10 '19
The energy output of the M87 jet is something like 200 million, trillion Death Stars. Continuously.
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u/Boomdang1001 Apr 10 '19
I remember V Sauce (at least I think it was him) saying something about this and now I finally am able to see it
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u/maddec Apr 10 '19
I never thought id see a real one in my lifetime. Amazing
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u/callmekizzle Apr 10 '19
Technically you still haven’t
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u/CeruleanRuin Apr 11 '19 edited Apr 11 '19
Technically you haven't actually seen anything at all, ever.
Light focused through your pupils stimulates biochemical structures on your retina, which sends information in the form of electrochemical pulses along your optical nerve to the visual centers of your brain, which interprets that as an image.
It's completely arbitrary to draw the line at naked eye viewing versus technologically-acquired visual information.
All those mechanical sensors, data lines, and screens that deliver pictures to your eyeballs are merely extensions of your individual biological sensors.
They are no less real than the tangled pathways between the world and the strange loops of thought and sensation you call you.
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u/FurryTrashFlo Apr 11 '19
he was talking about the fact that light doesn't escape black holes, so there's no light that could stimulate your retina.
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Apr 10 '19
Next step -> going into one of those. And that might really not happen in our lifetime
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u/PM_me_your_tail_slut Apr 10 '19
might really not
Not unless we invent lightspeed travel tomorrow lol.
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u/ScotchRobbins Apr 10 '19
And can wait the 50 million(?) years to make the trip.
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u/PM_me_your_tail_slut Apr 10 '19
Oh yeah forgot about that million at the end of the 50 lightyears. Yeah I'm not busy I got time.
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Apr 10 '19
Well if it's your lifetime and not the rest of the world, for you aboard the ship if you go at 99.99999....% the speed of light you would get there in what (FOR YOU AND FOR YOUR SHIP ONLY) feels like an instant. So if you moved at the speed of light right now you would 100% get there in your lifetime. Just not the rest of us' lifetime.
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u/Hrothgarex Apr 10 '19
To be fair, time is relative so if we moved at 99.99999999999999% the speed of light we would arrive in a little less than a year.
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u/jaded_fable Apr 10 '19
And that might really not happen in our lifetime
We have no reason to believe it will happen ever.
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u/Euryleia Apr 10 '19
Next step -> going into one of those.
I think there may be a few intervening steps we're omitting here... ;)
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u/thesockninja Apr 10 '19
forbidden peach ring
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u/JamesLiptonIcedTea Apr 10 '19
no kidding, it looks exactly like an out of focus krispy kreme donut fresh off the line
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u/nameless88 Apr 10 '19
If you took a bite out of it, it'd go straight to your thighs, though. Hoooo boy
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u/TabrisVI Apr 10 '19
So one thing I'm wondering from the articles I'm reading. The black spot in the center, technically, isn't the actual black hole, but the shadow it casts from eating light, right? Like, the whole thing, the glowing ring and the shadow are what we see when we look at a black hole, but they're not the actual thing, just the effects of the thing on the space around it. Or are all of these parts what we define as a "black hole"?
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u/canb227 Apr 10 '19
There's a couple things that make up a black hole.
The "true" black hole you're referring to is the singularity, the single point in which the matter is compressed. This is the point that generated most of the gravity.
Next is the schwarzschild radius, the distance at which the gravity is so strong that literally nothing could possibly escape once entered. This radius creates the black sphete, since no light can escape it.
Together, these two things make up what we call the "black hole". The bright matter around it, the accretion disk, is not part of the black hole, but just a ring of matter getting super heated by getting dragged towards the black hole itself
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u/Zamundaaa Apr 10 '19
There's also the photonsphere.
Have a look at Veritasiums "how does a black hole look like?" (it was something like that). He goes over all the important bits and pieces.
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u/Kotoy77 Apr 10 '19
"Nothing could possibly escape" hawking radiation would like to have a talk with you.
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u/Anuartato Apr 10 '19
Well we can't see the black hole, but the accretion disk of the event horizon gives an idea of how the black hole works, so yeah, we'll never see the actual black hole.
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u/sorenwasamuslim Apr 10 '19
Idk if it's just me but this shit makes black holes look scarier than the fake images
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u/ImBlessedAchoo Apr 10 '19
What happens in a black hole...
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u/groovy_giraffe Apr 10 '19
Does indeed stay there
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u/newschooliscool Apr 10 '19
F O R E V E R
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Apr 10 '19
Dumbass forgot to take the camera off blur
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Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 11 '19
For my colorblind homies
--------RED---------
RED BLACK RED
-----ORANGE-----
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u/scienceisanart Apr 10 '19
This is the one? Sag A*?
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u/tobascodagama Apr 10 '19
No, but the team behind this image also plans to image Sag A* when they can. And they might have even more telescopes networked together by then, which would mean even higher resolution!
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u/missle636 Apr 10 '19
They said they are currently already processing the Sag A* data.
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u/0818 Apr 10 '19
Isn't resolution limited by the longest distance between any two telescopes? I thought they had already maxed that out.
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u/CR90 Apr 10 '19
It's from M87.
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u/IWantToBeTheBoshy Apr 10 '19
Midnight City starts to play
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Apr 10 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/IWantToBeTheBoshy Apr 10 '19
Not at all! After googling to confirm... they got their name from the spiral galaxy Messier 83 :)
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u/NemWan Apr 10 '19
To achieve this historic image, a planet-wide network of radio telescopes had to be constructed and, weather permitting at all locations, they simultaneously focused on faint emanations traveling across space and time from your mom’s house.
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u/LaimbeerAdvocate Apr 11 '19
Your mama's so fat, this black hole tried to swallow her and she got stuck.
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u/zCourge_iDX Apr 10 '19
I don't think I'll ever grow tired of fat mom jokes
Ninjaedit: or at least OPs mom jokes.
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u/YMGenesis Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 11 '19
Hey everyone!
If you'd like a higher resolution image, the National Science Foundation's press release has a 4k image.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg
Another user posted a link to the original RAW image. It is 7416 x 4320, 183 Mb.
Hey everyone!
If you'd like a higher resolution image, the National Science Foundation's press release has a 4k image.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg (4000x2330, 864kb)
Another user posted a link to the original RAW image. .tif, 7416x4320, 183 Mb.
The same RAW full-size .tif image, converted to .jpg, shrunk with JPEGmini pro, 7416x4320, 722KB.
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Apr 10 '19
Anyone know what that orange light is?
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u/Roostalol Apr 10 '19
Light from the super-heated matter that is slowly being swallowed by the black hole as it orbits around.
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u/TheDarkWayne Apr 10 '19
So not only is it a black hole the light we see is matter from other celestial bodies it could have destroyed?
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u/lilmitchell545 Apr 10 '19
Correct, that’s currently celestial bodies/light getting rekt on the way inside the black hole, orbiting it as it’s being swallowed
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Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 12 '19
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u/lilmitchell545 Apr 10 '19
Right, my bad. Not currently happening, but that’s what we’re seeing. A moment captured in time from many, many, MANY years ago. Fuckin beautiful, man. Space.
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u/Mknowl Apr 10 '19
You should watch this and gain an awesome appreciation. This guy works for nasa and is a very good explainer. https://youtu.be/zUyH3XhpLTo
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u/Polonium-239 Apr 10 '19
Does he actually work for NASA? I thought he was just some youtuber with a degree in theoretical physics or something.
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u/omar_elrefaei Apr 10 '19
I am pretty sureDerekhave a degree in education. Not sure about physics.Wiki:
Muller graduated from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, with a BSc in Engineering Physics,[4] and, after moving back to Australia, completed a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney in 2008 with a thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education.
Mark Rober is the one who worked for NASA
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u/miketwo345 Apr 10 '19
Short answer: stuff that's being eaten by the black hole, so it's whirling around at a decent portion of the speed of light.
Longer answer: Google "veritasium black hole" and watch the video.
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u/blindcomet Apr 10 '19
The image was just colored that way. It's a grayscale image showing the glowing hot gas in accretion disk distorted by gravitational lensing.
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u/ElkGiant Apr 10 '19
Also shoutout to the only undergrad on the team who co authored all 6 papers on the research! He went to my high school! He was a super brilliant and awesome friend
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u/Krazy-Kat15 Apr 10 '19
It's weird to think I will tell my grandchildren I remember when the first picture of a black hole was taken.
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u/GurlinPanteez Apr 10 '19
I can't believe people in this thread thought we were getting some interstellar looking HD render of this thing.
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u/DJFUSION1986 Apr 10 '19
Im assuming the resolution of this picture will not increase for a good 20 years. Maybe when James Webb goes up we can get a better shot.
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u/JapaMala Apr 11 '19
We'd need a massive network of orbiting satellite telescopes, I think. Instead of 8 telescopes on the earth, have like a hundred geostationary satellites, or somewhere at that distance, but each with a different orbit plane.
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u/CeruleanRuin Apr 11 '19
God, imagine the resolution we could get if we could put telescopes in lunar orbit and at the Lagrange points.
Imagine if we left one or two behind in the orbit of every planet we sent a probe to! In a couple of decades we would have a telescope net the size of our solar system.
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u/Lepton78 Apr 10 '19
There are currently 16 posts of this image in this subreddit. Does /r/spaceporn do megathreads?
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u/GrandMasterBullshark Apr 10 '19
The eye of Sauron
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u/PaperPusher85 Apr 10 '19
The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare.
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u/earthmoonsun Apr 10 '19
Is it a true color image?
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u/S4mpleR3dditor Apr 10 '19
Wasn't it supposed to be Sagittarius A*? Why did they photograph one farther away?
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u/CapWasRight Apr 10 '19
The one in M87 is much larger, so it ends up being comparable in angular size. Sgr A* changes on much faster timescales (simply by virtue of size), so they're still working on dealing with that im the data.
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u/Detective51 Apr 10 '19
Remember how bad the first photo of Pluto was? I can’t wait to see this better in a few years.
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u/dont_worry_im_here Apr 10 '19
What is a black hole? I keep seeing this posted on /r/all and I don't know what I'm looking at.
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u/JohnnyJoestar69 Apr 10 '19
I have a noob question. Do camera images also work like a speed of light?? Because it says that this image is 55 million light years away, or maybe the light around that blackhole has already travelled and reached here. My other question os does it mean that that image is also 55 million years ago?
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u/immanoel Apr 10 '19
Yup, this is an image of the black hole 55 million years ago, this is because the light generated by the black hole took 55 million years to reach us
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Apr 10 '19 edited Sep 29 '20
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Apr 16 '19
This is the meme
The apex legend of a post!!
My fellow brethren, the base meme material itself! This needs at least triple the upvotes!
Help out the cause!
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u/Hashed8 Apr 10 '19
I thought they said they'd release a photo of the Black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*.
Does anyone know why they picked M87 instead? + wouldn't the image be better quality if they chose Sag A* since is closer to earth?
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u/TeejayH2SX Apr 10 '19
I believe this is the second image, everyone seems to have forgotten BBC's Parliament channel
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u/The-Swiss Apr 10 '19 edited Apr 10 '19
https://i.imgur.com/91jcgey.jpg
To put this into a bored worker’s perspective, the highlighted cell (top left) represents 1-Earth, and the most I could fit on my screen is somewhere in the neighborhood of 230,000 cells with 1-Earth in each cell. So times this by 13 excel screens with 230,000 cells containing 1-Earth in each cell, and you still do not have the complete scale in this extremely scientific excel comparison.
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u/tobyvicious Apr 11 '19
Ok... I'm an idiot. Can someone explain to me in dummy terms. What the significance of this is?
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '19
If only Einstein was here to see this