A Black Hole Has Been Found (Really!) - Event Horizon Telescope Detects M87

[DonRocks]

These are two really well-written articles:

Apr 9 - "A Brief History of Black Holes As We Await the Big Reveal from the Event Horizon Telescope" by Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach on washingtonpost.com

Apr 10 - "See a Black Hole for the First Time in a Historic Image from the Event Horizon Telescope" by Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach on washingtonpost.com

And here it is, an actual Black Hole - this is one of the most important pictures ever taken:

[Al Dente]

You're looking at warped space-time!

A well presented explanation of the image we see. 

 

[DonRocks]

What I've never understood is this: People talk of "infinite mass," but wouldn't one big black hole absorb another small black hole? If the mass (and gravity) is infinite, wouldn't a black hole the size of a pinhead swallow the entire universe? If the gravity was so strong, then why is there any periphery around it at all? Maybe "light" isn't the be-all and end-all that we think it is? 

Given that the black hole must surely get bigger as it swallows up things (otherwise, why would there be "supermassive black holes?"), why isn't it just considered a super-dense object of a certain size? Something that's strong enough to swallow light, but not outside the realm of the physics we know? I've never understood this. Scientists say that "physics breaks down inside the event horizon," but why? There must have been a finite amount of mass that has been swallowed, so why all this talk of infinity?

I get that there's a "tipping point" of mass where not even light can escape, but why does it change the fundamental nature of the object itself? This is one thing I've never understood, and I guess I'll probably never understand unless I can teach myself the math.

What, exactly, is the difference between a black hole, and an object immediately before it becomes a black hole, other than that light can no longer escape?

Someone please tell me why the first paragraph here isn't flat-out wrong. If something had infinite gravity, then why wouldn't it gobble up the entire universe? (And I don't buy the theory they "they expand inwardly; not outwardly," because then why would certain black holes be larger than others?)

In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate. As the eminent American physicist Kip Thorne describes it, it is "the point where all laws of physics break down".

[NolaCaine]

And the image was captured by a woman. The image of her on twitter the moment the image was captured is priceless. It portrays that absolute delight we all feel when we discover something for the first time. I bet she felt downright euphoric.

Katie Bouman

[DonRocks]

7 hours ago, NolaCaine said:

And the image was captured by a woman. The image of her on twitter the moment the image was captured is priceless. It portrays that absolute delight we all feel when we discover something for the first time. I bet she felt downright euphoric.

Katie Bouman

She looks like a little kid who was caught eating cookies.

This is great, but it doesn't make any sense - I can't believe that after all these years, and countless thousands of hours of labor, that one person was simply sitting at their desk, and was "the first" to see the image, which must have almost surely been "generated," rather than "taken." 

Can you explain?

[zgast]

3 hours ago, DonRocks said:

This is great, but it doesn't make any sense - I can't believe that after all these years, and countless thousands of hours of labor, that one person was simply sitting at their desk, and was "the first" to see the image, which must have almost surely been "generated," rather than "taken." 

Can you explain?

This CNN article does a pretty good job.  Evidently the algorithm was designed to do just this one thing. MIT wrote about it three years ago.