Reply to post: Re: More?

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

ibmalone

Re: More?

It's a good question. The data is going to be mined for years I'm sure, to test different theories on black holes and accretion discs. For one thing, just the shape of that halo confirms theories about how accretion discs behave around black holes, before we just had models, now we know they are right (sometimes), it also allows confirmation of the mass of the black hole, again this was previously only known indirectly, so we can be more confident about those methods. One thing that's gone largely unmentioned, they've got images from four days (nights?), showing the structure is stable over that time period. The ring structure confirms a lot of things about gravitational lensing and how light behaves near the event horizon.

The horse's mouth is a good place to start: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/. If you really want to get into the details, the first few papers are at IoP (open access). Papers V and VI are the most interesting for what they can actually tell from these images.

Like, why do they keep referring to it as a "shadow" and not an actual view into the gaping maw of eternity itself..

In the simple sense we can never see into a black hole, because no light can escape. There is the phenomenon of Hawking radiation, but it's produced outside the event horizon. So all you can see (if that's the right word), is nothing, a shadow. There's slightly more to it though, the shadow, the region from which you don't see light, is distorted by lensing effects and is bigger than the horizon, if the black hole was rotating significantly it would be noticeably oblate. Slightly disappointingly, M87 doesn't spin much, but they can at least confirm its shadow looks as expected.

But the simplest bullet point? Ever since they were first hypothesized, people have thought black holes couldn't exist for one reason or another, it's only really in the last three decades they became widely accepted, and now you're looking at one. (Quasars were discovered about 1960, but it was a long time before black holes were accepted as a possible explanation.)

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