Screenshot from press conference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;UBsPgzw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;UBsPgzw</a>Edit: Better posted above: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;p55wgfxsrfr21.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;p55wgfxsrfr21.jpg</a>

even the black hole photo is sucking up it&#x27;s own press conference! :-)

Is this image lossy compressed by Twitter? Is there an official release?

And the image itself:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg</a>

Breakthrough discovery in astronomy: press conference<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE</a>

Live Stream: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE</a>

Google Cache because site got stomped with traffic<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eso.org&#x2F;public&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;...</a>

Here&#x27;s an article (and image) from the guardian: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2019&#x2F;apr&#x2F;10&#x2F;black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough?CMP=fb_gu&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1554901867" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2019&#x2F;apr&#x2F;10&#x2F;black-hole-p...</a>

Here it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;image.futurezone.at&#x2F;images&#x2F;cfs_932w&#x2F;3398269&#x2F;bild-ist-da.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;image.futurezone.at&#x2F;images&#x2F;cfs_932w&#x2F;3398269&#x2F;bild-ist...</a>

Here&#x27;s the image via a URL:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png</a>&gt; Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

Here&#x27;s the image via twitter:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ehtelescope&#x2F;status&#x2F;1115964692802019328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ehtelescope&#x2F;status&#x2F;1115964692802019328</a>

Such a photon-centric perspective. Why don&#x27;t you use your neutrino perceptors to look at the seed?

Pedantic&#x2F;fun comment: I will assume that one of the presenters said that (I will watch the full video later tonight). One would imagine that that person knows that you cannot see a mustard seed from Brussels because the planet&#x27;s crust is blocking your line of sight ;) unless the scientist who said that is a flat-earth-believer!A statement like &quot;it is like viewing a mustard seed X kilometres&#x2F;miles away would be more appropriate.And in all seriousness, I have started watching again everything-Star-Trek again (for the 5th time in my life), and news like that make me look up to the sky and think that as a species we do have a chance to move out of here and to a better future.

&quot;This is like viewing a mustard seed in Washington DC from Brussels&quot;

Potentially none. They can just deny its existence and pretend this is a fabrication.

How do you explain observed gravitational wave observed by LIGO? It is almost the same as the one calculated for coalescence of two black holes in GR.

This is what convinced me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B0QRpid5_QU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B0QRpid5_QU</a>

Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence.And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes&#x27; argument that there is no real evidence of anything except our own existence.btw, I&#x27;m just some hacker&#x27;s AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.

I think you&#x27;re right, that they probably are a mathematical artifact of GR.  Regardless, what they are in the real world will share quite a few properties with black holes.

There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that&#x27;s it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.

? As you can obviously see in the image, the black hole is also flat.

From whatever videos I have watched I don&#x27;t believe so called &quot;flat earthers&quot; really believe that the earth is flat. At most they seem to be trolls and just like to oppose whatever scientists say. So IMO nobody should waste time explaining anything to them.

There are people that can&#x27;t believe the Earth is round... I can&#x27;t imagine what &quot;alternative explanation&quot; will be made to explain a black hole...

The telescope&#x27;s announcement is up, too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;</a>

What are you basing that on? (Edit:) From one of the papers released today:&gt; The ring is brighter in the south than the north. This can be explained by a combination of motion in the source and Doppler beaming. As a simple example we consider a luminous, optically thin ring... Then the approaching side of the ring is Doppler boosted, and the receding side is Doppler dimmed...This sense of rotation is consistent with the sense of rotation in ionized gas at arcsecond scales ..Notice that the asymmetry of the ring is consistent with the asymmetry inferred from 43 GHz observations of the brightness ratio between the north and south sides of the jet and counter-jet<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3847&#x2F;2041-8213&#x2F;ab0f43" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3847&#x2F;2041-8213&#x2F;ab0f43</a>(Edit 2:) Ahh, I see your comment now says &quot;did come out&quot;. I initially read it as &quot;did not come out&quot;, which was either a misreading on my part (likely) or an earlier edit by you.

Note that the prediction of the light being brighter on one side did come out.

Related video, made by Veritasium yesterday, is one of my favorite videos in a long time. He explained how the prediction of this image was made (before the image got released) and the video is great and fun to watch.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>

This 9 min video [0] does an excellent job explaining what we are looking at.[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&amp;feature=youtu.be</a>

It&#x27;s good science.Been able to make testable predictions and then confirming them or disproving them is the entire (awesome) point.

Einstein predicted the existence of black hole back in early 1915. Pretty amazing.

So amazing that scientists were able to predict what something would look like that we have never seen before.

If one needs an intro, this video should be watched before watching the press release..

A very good (technical) talk about the EHT project and the physics they try to do here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JiS1OJNBrvk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JiS1OJNBrvk</a>It is a bit old (2012), but comprehensive and with both good audio and readable* slides.*: In the sense that you can see the letters on them

The entire video is his description of the reasons for why it&#x27;ll look like a fuzzy coffee mug stain. It&#x27;s &quot;fuzzy&quot; because of the low resolution, not because the black hole itself is fuzzy. Undoubtedly there will be work to improve the best quality photograph of a black hole, now that we have one at all.

&gt;He says his reason for his confidence in this prediction is &quot;I think it&#x27;s going to look like a fuzzy coffee mug stain.&quot; He doesn&#x27;t give an actual reason.He doesn&#x27;t need to give a reason. The reasons why it would look like a &quot;fuzzy coffee mug stain&quot; are well known since Hawkings...

How about forgetting that video for a moment and trying to consider the following picture:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.projects.iq.harvard.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;styles&#x2F;os_files_xxlarge&#x2F;public&#x2F;eht&#x2F;files&#x2F;unnamed-2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.projects.iq.harvard.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;styles&#x2F;os_files...</a>Taken from here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;science" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;science</a> (the official site of the project).On the left is how it would look like if we weren&#x27;t so far -- we are 55 million light years far from that. You know the distance from us to our Sun, which you see on the sky but can cover with your own thumb? That object is 3,500,000,000,000 times farther than the Sun is far from us.On the right is what we can reconstruct from the signals measured because we are so far and we have &quot;only&quot; the telescope the size of the Earth. More details would be visible (the picture would look more like the one on the left) either if we had even much bigger telescope than the Earth, or if the black hole of the same size were much closer to us, which it is not.

Did you see the movie Interstellar? He included it in his video. That&#x27;s what the black hole looks like, except with the relativistic beaming make one side brighter than the other.Here&#x27;s the image from the movie: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;ut_interstellarOpener_f.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;ut_interste...</a>Now imagine that image being taken far away by several ground-based telescopes put together at the edge of their capabilities and using math to error correct and stitch together the final result. What you get is what we saw.

Ok, wait a second. I liked a lot of this video, but there are some aspects which are kind of ridiculous. He says his reason for his confidence in this prediction is &quot;I think it&#x27;s going to look like a fuzzy coffee mug stain.&quot; He doesn&#x27;t give an actual reason.He does talk a lot about theory, a lot of it interesting and novel to me, but by the end of the video, most of this theory suggests a different-looking image!

What bothered me more about the video is that of you watch the whole thing, he ends up talking about some theory which leads to another type of image prediction. He never actually explains why he chose to go with the former prediction rather than the latter.

I&#x27;m not sure how much we can truly draw from small irregularities in the image. This isn&#x27;t actually a low resolution image. It is an algorithmically interpolated image created by comparing possible interpretations of the spotty and noisy data gathered from multiple points at different times processed against images of what we think a black hole should look like.

Look at the expectation examples in the scientific paper from 2013 that is, from ca. 6 years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1309.3519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1309.3519</a>It matches quite good, I&#x27;d say. Page 4.

It doesn&#x27;t seem to be that accurate, as expectation was for it to have smoother photo sphere, but it has irregular bulges (5 of them). I think they discussed it briefly in the press conference as well. It would be interesting to see if this would change understanding of general relativity and may be give a hint for a theory of quantum gravity.

perpendicular - we see it almost exactly from the top. Mentioned during the Q&amp;A (41:33 to be exact)

apparently from the top. i hope we get to find another one sideways because they look cool ;)

Not sure if I missed it, but can we tell which way the accretion disk is from our view of it?

As far as I know, Veritasium and others occasionally join efforts and coordinate around soon to be published scientific discoveries in a goal to increase exposure. Don’t know if this was the case with the black hole image.

It&#x27;s too bad we cannot see the accretion disk edge-on as in the video.  That would have made it a perfect prediction.  Maybe it&#x27;s so thin that it&#x27;s overwhelmed by the projections of the top and bottom of the back side of the disk.

Smart move by Veritasium, making a video commenting the news just before the news actually happens. Time works in weird ways around black holes.Anyways, it is a good one. So is that channel in general.It is also a good video if you just watched Interstellar, because it also explains why the black hole looks the way it does in the movie. Note that the movie black hole rendering is slightly incorrect for artistic reasons, the video shows the more scientifically accurate version.

Different target audiences for a science YouTube channel and a scientific findings press conference.

The video by Veritasium is by a guy who literally got a PHD on the subject of making physics more approachable through videos. He is exactly the person I would expect to provide a more clear and understandable explanation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=280" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&amp;feature=youtu.be...</a>

Everyone knew what the image was going to look like, so it&#x27;s not any harder to prepare in advance.

It&#x27;d be extremely shocking if he hadn&#x27;t been able to. The math has been known for a very long time the largest differences would be based on the orientation of disk relative to us but that has been mostly known since the original Hubble picture. If he&#x27;d been significantly wrong that&#x27;d mean our understanding of the physics was wrong or something unknown was happening at a pretty large scale.

Wow, the video you posted is even more informative and clear than the actual press conference, and it was created by someone who hadn&#x27;t even seen the image yet based purely on the mathematical predictions of what we would see.Kind of sad that after all the amazing effort and resources that have gone into the creating the image that the international team couldn&#x27;t have featured an explanation as clear as this in their actual press conference.

I expect that at the resolution that this picture is taken it would be surprising if new radically physics was found, since it would require our current models to be very different from reality to see significantly different results

I think this is unhelpful parroting of comments on actual cutting edge physics experiments like the LHC. The degree matters substantially - there, we have good guesses of what we might see, but there&#x27;s uncertainty and new data is immensely valuable for narrowing hypotheses. It&#x27;s the research frontier.Reasoning about an image of a black hole is very much within the realm of standard science. Veritasium was able to explain the prediction using essentially ideas that are so basic they&#x27;re at the high school level. If our basic understanding of physics down to the high school level was wrong (e.g., very far from the research frontier), there would be very very serious issues.

We&#x27;ve furthered our understanding of the truth of the universe.  That&#x27;s not a bummer.

It&#x27;s probably a bit too early to say because e.g the magnetic field data that was also collected hasn&#x27;t even been scrutinized yet. This will also almost for sure lend a better understanding of the relativistic jets, in order to hopefully one day tell why they are this way or another depending on the particular black hole rather than just &quot;they are somehow often there&quot;.It&#x27;s still very early and like the detection of gravitational waves, I think it feels like more of a symbolic step into a new era of space science. It&#x27;s easy to forget that yesterday, black holes were a result of mathematics and only indirectly shown that they &quot;ought to exist&quot;.So first, I think we need to cut them some slack! Second, I think that if we at all WANT to shatter the Standard Model, I think we first need to be able to do science at the extremes of it! The LHC is one way, probing into the details of black hole mechanics might end up being another

&gt; Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it doesThis is of course a bummer, since this means that the acquired image does not give us any new clues of where our understanding of physics is wrong.

I just stumbled upon Veritasium a week ago while learning about the double slit experiment in quantum theory and trying to see some actual evidence [1] of the experiment.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Iuv6hY6zsd0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Iuv6hY6zsd0</a>

So is that hazy diagonal line in the image the accretion disc, viewed edge-on from the Earth?

Here&#x27;s the follow up video after the image was released:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S_GVbuddri8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S_GVbuddri8</a>

The Event Horizon Telescope site has had predicted images up for ages <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;science" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;science</a>

Another link describing what a black hole is:Part I: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VnJYo6LKzgA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VnJYo6LKzgA</a>Part II: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Nlry6LqWwJ0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Nlry6LqWwJ0</a>Peace

It&#x27;s a very well made pop-sci video, which probably substantially increases the likelihood of it being reshared.

Side observation: This video, and the video you linked to got two million views in just a few hours. I didn&#x27;t know black holes where this popular. (market opportunity here)

No, that is not how science works. We can say with 100% certainty that the theory has not been falsified by any test to date.

If the general theory of relatively was tested again and it proved to provide the next result, what does it say about actually is an black hole?Thus far, from all the experiment and result observed, the theory has been proven to be correct.Hence, it can be said with 99% certainty whatever it predicts must be correct. I hope it does mention about possibility of creating a worm hole.

That’s an oversimplification. The Schwarzschild radius is where to find an uncharged &amp; non-rotating black hole’s event horizon, and the event horizon is the surface at which newly generated photos (and all causal influences) can no longer escape.The innermost stable circular orbit is further out than the event horizon, 3 times the Schwarzschild radius IIRC. Anything closer to that has an unstable orbit.

In the video he talks about the Schwarzchild radius but doesn&#x27;t go into details. It is the distance from the center of the black hole to the event horizon.Anything which is not in that radius or not already in a path towards it should be safe from not getting sucked by the black hole.E.g. If our sun becomes a black hole, Schwarzchild radius would be 2.954Km i.e. anything outside ~3Km would be safe.This was explained in the scishow video on that topic[1].[1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Mm_ks1ce3C4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Mm_ks1ce3C4</a>

That was a great video, never grasped why interstellar and such showed black holes with the rings on top and bottom.

Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1].TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon &quot;directly&quot; being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>

Pretty much exactly what was predicted as to the livestream :-)

In the discussions they said that it appeared entirely consistent with GR. Presumably more specific analysis is in papers coming afterwards.

I wonder if this is a call for another level of math.  Are we just not able to take the derivative of something in respect to space time rather than just time?

General relativity predicted the event horizon, but it breaks down when trying to predict what is going on in the center, as all equations go to infinity, which is likely to be more a problem with our current understanding than what is actually happening.

USA Today is live streaming a presentation about this from the National Science Foundation and they seem to be taking the point of view that Einstein&#x27;s theory of general relativity has held up SO FAR. There is still quite a bit of research to do on the image &#x2F; data which means the theory could be further proven or disproven.

Any word if Einstein&#x27;s predictions are correct or refuted? There was word that if the shadow looked a certain way it could mean that relativity is incomplete.

Yes, fascinating! If you shift the focus of your eyes from the outside to the inside of the hole, it seems to &quot;pulsate&quot;

It&#x27;s the color scheme. I think in matplotlib it&#x27;s called &quot;hot&quot;. I do a lot of 2D kernel density plots that by having a black zero level and dozens of contour levels produce a smooth look with aesthetics similarities to this. I used to use that scheme because &quot;heatmaps&quot; but stopped because of the pulsing illusion.I&#x27;m not sure if this image is real color or just lightness value and they used a color scheme for drama.

Some time ago I&#x27;ve seen a picture over the Internet where the description said the more you see it &quot;moving&quot; the more likely you&#x27;re stressed.As for the black hole, looking it at full screen I see it pulsating a little.

I don&#x27;t even have to move my eyes, I stare at it and it&#x27;s constantly moving away from me. I had to check that it&#x27;s not actually a movie. Strangest thing.

It does look like it pulsates to me! 
That&#x27;s an interesting illusion :)

Interesting that so many people see this but for me it&#x27;s absolutely static.

I suspect this is because it&#x27;s extremely blurry, if you watch it on a large screen it might trick your eye into trying to refocus, obviously without success.

I think my eye is trying to bring it into focus. It is like when the camera on your phone can&#x27;t quite figure out what it is looking it and keeps adjusting.

looks like the image data was cleaned up with bicubic interpolation, or something of the like.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bicubic_interpolation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bicubic_interpolation</a>

Stare at it till there are two, then have fun snapping them in and out.

moving the picture on my screen caused some eye bug

Yes, and I also see a spot in the shape of it after looking away, though that may just mean my monitor is too bright

Yes if you dance your focus around the image, it appears to pulsate. Probably your pupils constricting and dilating due to the high contrast in the image.

Does that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?

The additional pixel density probably doesn&#x27;t add any details though. The original image looks like a smoothed-out version of a low-res image anyway...

Probably because of HN effect again. Yes it is down.

The picture is not captured by lenses, or an optical telescope at all. It is created by inverting the data received at eight radio telescopes (or eighty individual dishes) around the world. And the smoothing is just due to the inherent limit in the resolving power of the telescope array. The impressive bit is that we see more than a single bright dot.

There is no lens. This was done using eight radio telescopes (or arrays) around the globe to create a &quot;virtual&quot; radio telescope which is effectively the size of the earth. After that the data of the individual telescopes was processed to produce an image.There is some more info in the wikipedia article for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Event_Horizon_Telescope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Event_Horizon_Telescope</a>

From the press conference, they said that the raw captured data took up 6 cubic meters of hard drives

the original tiff is 7416x4320it&#x27;s still too many pixel, it can be a fifth of that while conveying the same amount of information.I&#x27;m puzzled by this, if each of those pixel is actually captured by the lenses, why is it all this much uniform? was it smoothed or does this suggest that it&#x27;s actually a gigantic uniform cloud of gas?haven&#x27;t seen the whole video of the release, I&#x27;ll have to catch up later in the evening, but this really seems to have captured way too much compared to the actual lens resolution and I wonder what would be the &quot;confidence interval&quot; or astrophysical equivalent on each of those pixels.

$40mSo basically nothing in the grand scheme of anything.

Whenever this type of question comes up, how much science cost, think about the following:It costs more to do a sciency Hollywood movie about than it costs to actually do the science. Sending an actual probe to the orbit of Mars is in general cheaper than making a sci-fi movie.So...

Thanks for the source article! I had heard about this but not seen any material on it until now.

The article linking to that image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276</a>

And a really great explanation of why it looks the way it does:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>

Mind you, that&#x27;s a JPG you are editing, so in the 8 bit sRGB color space. That means manipulations can lead to errors and illusions due to the color space being non-linear and clipped[0].The original data was likely linear and at a much higher precision. If the source was a 16 bit linear grayscale PNG for example you could be much more assured you&#x27;re not seeing the effects of JPG compression and things that were actually measured.EDIT: Found better sources:16-bit sRGB PNG: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;eht&#x2F;files&#x2F;20190410-78m-4000x2330.png?m=1554877782" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventhorizontelescope.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;eht&#x2F;files&#x2F;20190410-7...</a>180 MiB original TIFF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eso.org&#x2F;public&#x2F;images&#x2F;eso1907a&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eso.org&#x2F;public&#x2F;images&#x2F;eso1907a&#x2F;</a>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw</a>

Those &#x27;details&#x27; aren&#x27;t real.  The image is the result of a complex interpolation algorithm that takes very noisy and incomplete data as its input.  The resolution is quite limited.

I do (I think...) the bands are atifacts:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;dhN9Pf9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;dhN9Pf9</a>

editing that image reveals all kinds of details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;TvQsgbA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;TvQsgbA</a> (and I don&#x27;t even know what I&#x27;m doing)

Higher resolution official release seems to be: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;special_reports&#x2F;blackholes&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;A-Consensus.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;special_reports&#x2F;blackholes&#x2F;download...</a>

If I recall this correctly, the movie intentionally simplified the rendering of the black hole (by eliminating the Doppler shift) to make it more visually appealing.Pity, really. Then again, there were other things that made no sense in the movie...

Since we&#x27;re on it, there&#x27;s actually a book about the science of interstellar.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0393351378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne&#x2F;dp&#x2F;03...</a>

Side note - there&#x27;s a really neat write-up by someone who realistically rendered a rotating black hole in 1979, partly by computer and partly by hand [0]. He goes through all the important visual effects, like GR ray tracing, disk brightness, and Doppler shift. The final image is pretty cool.[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.futura-sciences.com&#x2F;e-luminet&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;black-hole-imaging-2-heads-tails&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.futura-sciences.com&#x2F;e-luminet&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;black...</a>

This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it&#x27;s lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk).<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.nature.com&#x2F;aviewfromthebridge&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;28&#x2F;imaging-black-holes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.nature.com&#x2F;aviewfromthebridge&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;28&#x2F;imagin...</a>

I wonder how it compares to the one from Interstellar?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn26966-interstellars-true-black-hole-too-confusing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn26966-interstellars-t...</a>

I wonder how important time is in collecting these data? Because if 6 months isn’t an issue, then the array size could be expanded in one axis to the diameter of Earth’s orbit around the sun, no?

The limit in some sense is the size of the Earth. This picture is from an interferometer observing at very high radio frequencies (wavelength of 1.3 mm) using telescope around the Earth. To improve resolution you would either have to go to even higher frequencies (we have a very hard time doing interferometry there) or find baselines larger than what fits on Earth. And you don&#x27;t just need a long baseline, but need to keep the baseline constant to within a fraction of the wavelength. So if you want to use satellites to get longer baselines you would have to know their orbit to within a tenth of a millimeter.As an aside: that image is basically black and white. The intensity is just mapped to black -&gt; orange -&gt; white instead of black -&gt; gray -&gt; white.

Very good point. I was too much focused on resolution. Adding more telescopes would indeed give a better picture of large structures (most are cropped out of the current view because they are not well imaged and you would mostly see artifacts from the image reconstruction) and improve dynamic range, i.e.  allow to see things much fainter than the brightest spot in the image.

One thing missing from @petschge&#x27;s reply: adding more telescopes! This will not improve the imaging the smallest possible features, but will make features larger (disk and &#x2F; or jet components) more prominent. The more telescope pairs with different distance between them are added, the more complete the picture will get - up to a limit of having a single antenna roughly the size of Earth.Furthermore, adding more telescopes will help better image the fainter features in the image (due to larger total collecting surface).

So much higher res than I thought (I was expecting a 3x3px black and white).Does anyone know if this is aggregated over a long time so it&#x27;s unlikely to improve with more observation? And what is limiting the resolution at this point?

That showmanship counts. I don’t believe HN would argue with me if I said “a strong sales group can make or break a company”. Why is it unfashionable to suggest that, in the marketplace of ideas, with an announcement of this magnitude, this exciting, this “sexy”, the presentation of the announcement would benefit from being delivered in a likewise suitable atmosphere. At night, as an event, in a cool warehouse with cool music. I’m not trying to take anything away from the inherent excitement and importance of the news. Just suggesting that the cause could be furthered even more if there was a little hype, a little showmanship. Rather than a well lit lecture hall populated by scruffy reporters, early in the morning, morning as defined in the locale the event is being held.

Isn&#x27;t that related to the fact that it has been announced across the world at the same time? In europe it was announced at 3 pm for example. I&#x27;m sorry, I don&#x27;t understand your point

One difference between a Tesla or Apple style event vs a staid, scientific one such as this. Starting in the evening vs 9am...

&gt; We&#x27;ve maxed out the Earth&#x27;s baseline, so it seems like orbital radio telescopes are the only way to better resolution.Going to higher frequency gives you higher resolution for a given physical baseline length.

&gt; I imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink bandwidth... there&#x27;s just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about down from a satellite.Why do you say that? The latest High Throughput commercial satellites do 500Gpbs downlink throughput, so shouldn&#x27;t the transfer time for a petabyte of data be reasonable? Of course those satellites are configured to transmit data all over the earth, so the technology would have to be used differently for this application.

Space VLBI is a thing already! Seems to have been around for a while [0][1]. I imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink bandwidth... there&#x27;s just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about down from a satellite. It&#x27;s already so much data that it&#x27;s easier to fly hard drives around the world than to send it over the internet, so the transfer would probably take ages over a microwave link. Maybe with laser communication in the near future but even then... it&#x27;s a lot of data.Resolution-wise, the angular resolution is inversely proportional to the farthest baseline, as given by the Rayleigh criterion. [2] To get twice the resolution, you &quot;just&quot; need to double the size of your baseline (and do that in both dimensions, otherwise the angular resolution will be different in x &amp; y). We&#x27;ve maxed out the Earth&#x27;s baseline, so it seems like orbital radio telescopes are the only way to better resolution. Pretty exciting![0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jpl.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;space-very-long-baseline-interferometry-space-vlbi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jpl.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;space-very-long-baseline-i...</a>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asd.gsfc.nasa.gov&#x2F;blueshift&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;thirty-years-of-space-vlbi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asd.gsfc.nasa.gov&#x2F;blueshift&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;25&#x2F;thi...</a>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Angular_resolution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Angular_resolution</a>

&gt; Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start.There is space-based VLBI at lower radio frequencies, with the &quot;Radio Astron&quot; project[0]. That effort works at frequencies which are roughly a factor of ~10 lower than that of the EHT. I&#x27;m not aware of any plans for millimeter Space VLBI, but the higher frequency would require higher data rates.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asc.rssi.ru&#x2F;radioastron&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asc.rssi.ru&#x2F;radioastron&#x2F;</a>

How does one even deal with ISM scattering?The optical equivalent can be dealt with by active optics, or picking frames with best seeing, but for ISM I imagine it is a fair bit different.

&gt;&gt; Also I&#x27;d be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.One of the reasons they&#x27;ve imaged M87* rather than a black hole in our own galaxy was to avoid dealing with ISM scattering - we don&#x27;t have to look through our edge-on disk, so it&#x27;s easier to image another galaxy&#x27;s center somehow. But the Sgr A* image might be in the works already, it was mentioned in both the press-conference and one of the paper&#x27;s future work section.

You can ask them directly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;askscience&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bbknik&#x2F;askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_here_to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;askscience&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bbknik&#x2F;askscien...</a>

How big a VLBI baseline would they need to see much more detail? Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start.Also I&#x27;d be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.

The European broadcast presentation is not great.The speakers are referencing images and diagrams that are not visible on screen.The accomplishment speaks for itself. The delivery can be improved.

Both ESO and the NFS hosts the images, don&#x27;t know what gave you any other impression.And while the EC stream was pretty bad, at least they let you skip back in the stream and left it up after the presentation ended. The NFS stream wouldn&#x27;t allow you to go back (useful if you joined late) while it was up.Personally I liked the ALMA stream best, but it&#x27;s down now :(

Too bad they don&#x27;t present it well. I just see self congratulating politicians and officials on some youtube stream.Telling that it&#x27;s a US organization that hosts the actual picture.esa.int and eso.org seem to be down actually.

because it&#x27;s one Commissioner per member state, and apparently nationality is the most important criteria for appointing ministers

Why is the European Commission doing this? When I recognized Carlos Moedas I immediately skipped to what mattered. The reason why he was ever appointed as Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation is, to me, more remote than the black hole about which he knows absolutely nothing.

Well this was mostly a US-run effort. It&#x27;s headed by Harvard University and the key South Pole Telescope is North American.

The EU is finally learning from the US when it comes making a lot of fanfare for discoveries and other inventions.

There are 6. It&#x27;s an international accomplishment.

Why there are two live events right now? One is from Europe, another from US:EU: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Dr20f19czeE</a>US: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=re_o0uckG-M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=re_o0uckG-M</a>

These obs are in radio. We could replace your eyes with radio eyes...   ..but it&#x27;s friction heating so it ought to be broadly blackbody, so I would say yes.

This image is a representation of radio observations. What we would see in the visible part of the spectrum would be different but the structure would likely be similar.

regular orbits around black holes are possible. Depending on activity if it&#x27;s far enough away the radiation should be survivable, it just depends on how much matter it&#x27;s eating up and whether the orbit is planar enough to its spin (otherwise its jets can be deadly).

You&#x27;d probably be dead from the radiation (that light peaks in the x-ray wavelengths) long before any of the spatial distortion effects got to you.

Is this what we would see with the naked eye if we were close enough to the black hole? Or would we see nothing, because at this distance we would be dead (or the universe ended all around us)?

Because that collection of pixels is really out there

I mean, in the end, everything that you&#x27;re looking at is just a collection of cones and rods in your retina. It&#x27;s the information that it conveys that really matters.

It&#x27;s just a stupid collection of small pixels but somehow it feels very overwhelming looking at it for the first time.What a time to be alive

I think you&#x27;ve got a typo here: points should be 0-dimensional.

&gt; A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single infinitesimal point.A point is 0-dimensional. A line is 1-dimensional.The singularity is 1-dimensional (more precisely, a ring) if the black hole is rotating. [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ring_singularity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ring_singularity</a>

The singularity is likely a mathematical artifact of the fact that GR is insufficient to describe black holes. In reality (quantum gravity) they probably do not exist.

A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single infinitesimal point. The event horizon around it is roughly a sphere. The diagrams that you are talking about are a visual metaphor that represent 3D space as a 2D plane and the 3rd dimension standing in for the influence of gravity. IRL, spacetime has 3 spatial dimensions, not 2, and gravity is not a dimension but a force. It&#x27;s hard to visually represent gravitational distortion of 3 dimensional space without a 4th spatial dimension to do it with, so textbook diagrams use a 2D plane.

1. Yes, but it&#x27;s also up for debate, since it&#x27;s also known that the information content of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, so 2D.2. The event horizon is spherical. Mathematically we treat it as a point. Nobody knows.3. It&#x27;s a gravity well, so everything falls towards it like it does towards the earth. Since it&#x27;s the center of a galaxy, and galaxies form a 2D spin plane, most matter will be circling it, like our solar system circling the sun, so most matter will come from that planar distribution.We will never see anything fall into a black hole, as in our space-time, this would happen at infinite time. As things get closer, they red shift from our frame of reference due to time dilation, until the light frequencies are so low that we can no longer detect them

The stretchy sheet of space time illustration is just a simplified visualization space is 3 dimensional so the warping is 3D. The stretchy sheet visual is used a lot because showing a warped 3D grid to be more accurate is a lot harder and a lot less clear and illustrative. Trying to show a 3D grid doesn&#x27;t even fully capture the situation because it doesn&#x27;t show how the passage of time gets distorted as well.

Let&#x27;s start a movement similar to flat Earth, but instead it&#x27;s Spherical Black Hole. I refuse to believe that a black hole is anything but a sphere no matter what evidence I&#x27;m shown.

Is an image of a sphere printed on paper three dimensional? Think about that for a moment, and you&#x27;ll see the problem.I am not a physicist, but from my lay understanding, a black hole (and all other forms of matter) exists in a four-dimensional space-time form that we can experience directly, plus a number of higher dimensions that we can only extrapolate, and observe indirectly via experiment (kind of how a picture of a sphere is not a sphere due to a missing dimension, but you can still tell it&#x27;s a sphere based on other characteristics). The exact number of higher dimensions is the realm of string theory, and could be 10, 11, 26, or something else.The singularity of the black hole is one-dimensional, I think (I could be wrong, I&#x27;m often wrong). The event horizon is... funny. The outside of the event horizon is in four-dimensional space-time and is more or less &quot;spherical&quot;. The inside is a land of theory and debate, because by definition we can&#x27;t directly observe it from our space-time. Do space and time even exist inside the event horizon? I dunno, ask someone who knows what they&#x27;re talking about. The best I can do is an analogy. Imagine it&#x27;s the surface of the ocean. Above the surface, you&#x27;re in air. Below the surface, you&#x27;re in water.

So is a black hole 3 dimensional? Is it a sphere? Or does it only work in certain directions? Does everything &quot;fall&quot; the same direction?I ask because even in a brief history of time, the diagrams are very &quot;single plane of space-time, pulled infinitely deep by the black hole&quot;

Things don&#x27;t simply form a halo around a black hole. Instead you get a relatively flat accretion disk of things that orbit around the black hole.

The same reason planetary rings, solar systems, and (spiral) galaxies are flat: friction and conservation of angular momentum. Internal drag forces will eventually cancel out velocity components perpendicular to the plane of rotation, turning a cloud into a flat plane.

This was a great explanation:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>

Material can come in towards the black hole from any angle. However, because matter can&#x27;t just pass through other matter, matter travelling in the wrong directions will collide more frequently than matter travelling in the right direction. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the &quot;right&quot; direction will depend on the average angular momentum of everything in the cloud that is collapsing into the disk.You might be interested to know that this is the same reason all the planets in our solar system orbit in the same disk: all the matter that is now in our solar system was originally a very thin cloud of gas with a small amount of overall angular momentum. As gravity drew it together it flattended out into a disk and eventually the clumps became planets (and the sun in the middle.)

From reddit:&gt;&quot;Hi, regarding the image itself: What I don&#x27;t understand is why does it look like a donut and not a bright sphere? Assuming the black hole is actually spherical and not disc shaped, I would expect the Halo to be spherical and surrounding the black hole? so all we would see would be the ball of bright gas, even though there is a black hole in the middle?&quot;This is also what I would have expected.

The papers with the scientific details are here (open access):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;page&#x2F;Focus_on_EHT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;page&#x2F;Focus_on_E...</a>Article in physics world with comparisons to simulations:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physicsworld.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;first-images-of-a-black-hole-unveiled-by-astronomers-in-landmark-discovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physicsworld.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;first-images-of-a-black-hole-unve...</a>&quot;AskScience&quot; AMA on Reddit about the breakthrough:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;askscience&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bbknik&#x2F;askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_here_to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;askscience&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bbknik&#x2F;askscien...</a>

If you mean the brightness asymmetry, it&#x27;s because the accretion disc is spinning. This video predicts pretty well all of the features we expected to find, and it lines up with the actual image.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>

On a tangent, interesting closing remarks from the commissioner on the importance of courage, dreams and science.  
Targeted towards the present anti-science climate.

Excellent example of successful international collaboration, with distributed team. Great results and promising future work: they say Sagitarius-A* is their next target!

&gt; 55 million light yearsdidn&#x27;t he correct himself and said kilometers

Yes, we&#x27;re using a telescope the size of the Earth to look at an object the size of our solar system in a galaxy about 55 million light years away. It&#x27;s an infinitesimally small patch of sky.On the other hand, the jet from the M87 black hole is quite large and we have good images of it. It&#x27;s even resolvable by amateurs, I hope to take a picture of it over Easter with a small telescope.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Messier_87#Jet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Messier_87#Jet</a>

The significance of the image is not in its quality, but in its mere existence.It&#x27;s enough to confirm various predictions, and should give a new baseline for truth about black holes.

Consider yourself lucky that a black hole isn&#x27;t Jupiter level distance from us.

Jupiter level quality would mean that we are so close that we would be instantly torn apart.

It is a letdown. Although I wasn&#x27;t expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn&#x27;t blow me away because it&#x27;s just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.

I don&#x27;t get the whole &quot;oh it&#x27;s too blurry and nothing is visible&quot; comments. It&#x27;s a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?

Constructing a telescope on Mars would be a valuable investment when a permanent presence is based there.

I know this comment will sound a bit unrelated to the main topic but reading this made this thought pop up in my mind and I thought it would make sense to share it. This comment is, however, related to the sub topic of the quoted sentence:&gt; It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.This is the same constraint for the, let&#x27;s call it, &quot;peace on Earth&quot; problem, or just &quot;peace&quot;.If only more of us could realize this is what it takes to solve that problem... which itself is part of the puzzle, i.e. how to increase awareness about the need to solve this.While there are a number of people and organizations trying to do this, I see that there seems to be more possible fronts that could be used to tackle this and accelerating the reach for stability and sustainability of the state of peace.One example of a possible front (and I honestly don&#x27;t know if those already exist) is: through marketing it would be possible to influence people enough to be interested in the outcome of &quot;peace on Earth&quot; and pay some money for that, in a way that it doesn&#x27;t feel like a donation, and more like an investment or maybe acquiring a service that would be hopefully realized in the coming years (hence the importance of the marketing capacity of that entity, as this mindset needs to be set in the consumers in order to make them buy the good).Of course, the reporting to the consumers on the use of the invested money toward that effort has to be as transparent and honest as possible, as those approaches are arguably required for a sustainable state of peace. And hopefully it would make enough sense for an entity to operate in the way of the outcome it is seeking. Even though we are moving from a state of no-peace, which is hopefully unsustainable. In other words the effort could be be defined as &quot;safely and confidently accelerating the maximum point of unsustainability of the no-peace state such that it inevitably transitions to a sustainable state of peace&quot;.That&#x27;s then possibly a private endeavor (not that it could not be a public one as well, but you need to raise enough money to pay for the possibly expensive marketing and then pay all of its employees), because there is now an identifiable market willing to pay some amount in exchange for obtaining the &quot;product&quot; of peace, which in other words just mean the modulation of humanity and its mindset in order for it to operate in such a way that it is always aligned to its own common good, or maximum known state of well-being, sustainably.We already know that groups and individuals are not great at doing that, on average. So if an individual is not always able to operate towards its own good, or maybe some are but don&#x27;t have access to the resources that would allow them to do so, how could then a group of individuals be able to do so? Unlikely.And yes, exploring the universe and finding more about its mysteries and teaching humanity about them is a valid and great approach and a subset of all the possible approaches.It is a subset because in order for an individual to be interested in knowing more about the mysteries of the universe, or consciousness and other topics, they have to have this mindset, well, set in the mind.Therefore there are many more fronts that could be, and to many extents currently are, covered. So all I&#x27;m arguing here is we are not doing enough to reach the tipping point before possible big catastrophes happen, therefore we should do a lot more than what we&#x27;re currently doing. There are many entity&#x2F;company&#x2F;organization models to explore that could benefit us in a spectrum of possibilities ranging from private to public.

If I understand it, this class of “telescope” is made up of arrays of telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on those too but if that involves a lot of satellites in a heliocentric orbit that may limit contributions considerably.

So true, I was also recently thinking I should read more science&#x2F;engineering news because that&#x27;s actually positive stuff happening.

International collaboration on scientific projects (International space station, CERN) always fills me with hope and optimism for humanity.It&#x27;s a nice contrast to opening the papers and reading the regular news, dominated by politics, with all the pessimism that creates.Hooray for science.

Have a look at the papers listed at the bottom of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;page&#x2F;Focus_on_EHT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2041-8205&#x2F;page&#x2F;Focus_on_E...</a> .Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they have used CASA and AIPS, two standard software tools that have been developed over more than a decade. Details are consequently scattered over many papers. Radio interferometry is not new and there is entire textbooks on the subject. The exiting bit here is not that we go a first image from interferometry but that we have a first image of the region just around a black hole.

5 PB. The American unveiling focus on just what you talk about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk</a>

Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.

For this event they could have purchased multiple use containers for each person.  Wasteful but a better image.  So not really their personal containers.

Most scientist I know have a reusable water bottle on their desk. And a coffee cup. But it will likely have a cat or a joke of the &quot;astronomers do it in the dark&quot; flavour on it. Not something you typically want to show on TV. Also they traveled from their home institutes to the location of the press conference and got handed that plastic bottle by some well-meaning PR person.

A small thing.  It could have been nice if the scientists didn&#x27;t have commercial bottled water on stage.  As an example to the world. Reusable personal containers would have been nice.

Interstellar also turned off the doppler effect, maybe to get a boring symmetric ring instead of an awesome asymmetric one as nature intended it to be!

It doesn&#x27;t look anything like Gargantua in Interstellar, but it&#x27;s not really supposed to, except for the most prominent features.  Interstellar showed what a black hole might look like in visible light while in orbit around it.  This is a radio telescope image from a far away galaxy.

The visualization I liked the best in Interstellar was that of the wormhole, seen from the outside. (The &quot;travel&quot; through it was rubbish.)The thing would look like a mirror sphere, floating in the middle of space, reflecting the space around you. Except it would be the space on the other side of the wormhole, not that behind you, and the motion of the &quot;mirrored&quot; image would be opposite of that on a real mirror. (The apparent image on the wormhole&#x27;s spherical surface would appear to move in your same direction, as you&#x27;re moving around it, not in the opposite direction as it does on a spherical mirror.)It took me a while to reason about it and figure out that it was indeed what a wormhole would look like, if we could find or create one.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;f3ptQ0CPMmU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;f3ptQ0CPMmU</a>

this presentation by kip thorne is very detailed about the science behind the movie. it&#x27;s one of the best presentations i have seen, and i have watched it multiple times.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lM-N0tbwBB4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lM-N0tbwBB4</a>

just had my wife watch it and yea, that was the first thing I noticed, they really did a good job on the science of interstellar.When interstellar came out wired did a full magazine spread on the movie, covering its science, how they came up with the story and what the director did to make sure it was believable. idk what it looks like online but I&#x27;ve kept the magazine.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. If anybody else is interested in reading more, the book &quot;The Science of Interstellar&quot; is fascinating and very easily digestible even if you&#x27;re not big on physics.

Does anyone remember Interstellar. Their black hole simulation was based on hard science. Looks fairly similar

A lot of the problems with imaging the black hole at the center of the milkway is that we would have to look along the midplane of the galaxy towards the center. That is where a lot of gas and dust is to be found and the radio waves interact with that stuff. They did take data and are working on it, but the image of M87* was easier to reconstruct and went out first.

Event horizon telescope has been taking data of the Sag A* black hole but the data is still being processed and yet to be released.

So we got an image of one in a far away galaxy before the one in the center of our own galaxy!

There is non-manual ways to do it (called self-calibrating), but those need many more antennas. (What you really need is good coverage of the (u,v) plane AND many more different baselines between pairs of telescopes than the number of individual antennas.) If you do not have that self-calibration fails and leads to horrible image artifact or does not converge at all. They limited the influence of the manual calibration by observing a Quasar which is basically a point source between subsequent observations of M87* to get an independent amplitude calibration.

Yeah, apparently radio interferometry is still very manual and so involves many relatively subjective decisions to produce an image.That&#x27;s probably why they had several analysers that they then combined into progressively larger teams until they could produce this Consensus-A picture.

&quot;This is more realistic of the uncertainties involved in this high-end image reconstruction. Still amazing though! Fig. 4 in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3847&#x2F;2041-8213&#x2F;ab0e85" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iopscience.iop.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3847&#x2F;2041-8213&#x2F;ab0e85</a> &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karlglazebrook&#x2F;status&#x2F;1115981369711058944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karlglazebrook&#x2F;status&#x2F;111598136971105894...</a>

Shouldn&#x27;t it increase, just with square of the radius, so it&#x27;s dwarfed by all the effects that scale with cube of the radius?

The Hawking radiation for a black hole with this mass would be really small. It actually decreases with added mass. So, this observation does not say anything about Hawking radiation.

Neither. Hawking radiation - if it exists – is far too weak to be detected this way.

Does this confirm or disapprove Steven Hawking Black-hole radiation?

The black hole at the center of the milky way is 4 million times the mass of our sun, the one in the photograph is much more massive.  Im guessing that is what they were referring to.

Misspeak? This video says it&#x27;s 4 million times as massive as the sun, but today&#x27;s press release and Wikipedia article about it both say it&#x27;s 6.5 billion times as massive.

Here&#x27;s an animated explanation of the process by the Event Horizon Telescope. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;hMsNd1W_lmE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;hMsNd1W_lmE</a>

Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]