• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Astronomical News

Whilst still perplexed how this possible, looks like the real deal...

We're About to See The First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole. Here's What It Might Be Like

BY MICHELLE STARR
APRIL 04, 2019

The year 2019 is here. With it, we've been promised a splendid moment in astronomy. For years, the Event Horizon Telescope has been working to bring us the first ever telescopic photograph of the event horizon of a black hole.

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-re-...a-black-hole-here-s-what-it-might-be-like/amp
 
And here is the first image of a black hole, and I’ll start the ball rolling, it’s the Eye of Sauron!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47873592
E212343F-6200-4DC4-AB81-0DD50629611B.jpeg
 
And here is the first image of a black hole, and I’ll start the ball rolling, it’s the Eye of Sauron!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47873592
View attachment 16190

It'll be interesting to see what detail we get if there are higher res pictures still to come, if I understand this correctly, the light isn't coming from the black hole, rather it's all lensed from the background.

The black centre is where the size of the black hole exceeds the angle that light is being bent around it ie actual event horizon seen face on.
 
It does look a lot like it was imagined to look - excellent.

Can some-one explain what I'm looking at please ? I presume it's not a photograph, so maybe a composite signal from an array of radio telecopes ? That would require software to interpret the data and build an image - maybe that's why a black hole looks like a torus (as anticipated), why atoms under an electron microscope look like the ball and stick models and why the Martian sky in the Viking photos was originally green (actually red but the software was calibrated to show all sky as blue).
 
Can some-one explain what I'm looking at please ? I presume it's not a photograph, so maybe a composite signal from an array of radio telecopes ? That would require software to interpret the data and build an image - maybe that's why a black hole looks like a torus (as anticipated), why atoms under an electron microscope look like the ball and stick models and why the Martian sky in the Viking photos was originally green (actually red but the software was calibrated to show all sky as blue).

Yes it's a composite image formed from I think 8 radio telescopes around the world. There was a BBC prog about it last night, probably now on iplayer.

The photo image may not look that impressive but it is 55m light years away & not that large. They had to go to some lengths to get it, combining teams worldwide.

Weather conditions had to be clear at all locations at the same time. In addition, relative positions had to be calculated exactly. The telescope on Antarctica is on a moving ice sheet, & all of them moved several meters in altitude depending on the position of the moon & it's gravitational pull. All of this had to be accounted for. Hard drives had to be kept at optimum temperature - overheating would be disastrous. In short, everything had to work perfectly at the same time. The technical feat was quite exceptional.

I think they got far more data than just the image. Drives & drives of it. The programme is well worth a watch.
 
Last edited:
Israel's first Lunar lander suffers a glitch, which has greatly extended its orbit. Hopefully will not prevent the lander from errm ... landing:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/03/06/space_roundup/

Sadly it has crash landed. Or was it shot down by missiles from a nazi Moonbase?

The first privately funded mission to the Moon has crashed on the lunar surface, in a blow to what had been hoped would have been a landmark moment for space exploration.

The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet, named after the Hebrew for “in the beginning”, was a joint project between SpaceIL, a privately funded Israeli non-profit organisation, and Israel Aerospace Industries. It set off for the moon in late February but crashed on the lunar surface after the apparent failure of its main engine.

https://www.theweek.co.uk/100729/fi...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
 
Astronomy.com

Second ghostly galaxy without dark matter discovered, first confirmed
Ironically, by finding two galaxies severely lacking in dark matter, researchers have made a compelling case for the existence of the mysterious material.
 
Hugely worth watching too, there's a crude video clip later on made up of images of the black hole taken over the period of a week and showing fluctuations in the accretion disk.

 
Found in Papua New Guinea.

A new study by two Harvard researchers reveals the cosmos may have already deposited the first such far-flung visitor onto our doorstep five years ago in 2014, when a small meteor crashed into Earth near Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific. According to their research, this 1.5-foot-wide object most likely came all the way from another solar system.

Think about it: An object, originating untold miles and millennia away, just plopping into the sea. The implications are as vast and mysterious as the wide open space from which it came.

"Almost all of the objects that hit the Earth originate for the solar system," explains Dr. Abraham Loeb, the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, and the co-author of the study. "They are made of the same materials that made the solar system. Those that are interstellar originate from another source. It's sort of like getting a message in a bottle from a distant location. We can actually examine it, just as if we were walking on the beach and looking at the seashells that are swept ashore, we could learn something about the ocean."


Continued:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...cations-are-fascinating/ar-BBW2dXM?li=BBnb7Kz
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Makes me wonder how accurate they are at determining the % of dark matter at vast distances away? Sound theoretical

Galaxies need to have a certain amount of mass relative to the velocities of the stars in them otherwise they would fly apart, at any distance the deficit is deemed to be dark matter. Or something else we totally don't understand is going on.
 
Back
Top