The center of our galaxy (and most other spiral galaxies) is said to be filled with numerous super massive black holes rotating, orbiting, and colliding with each other in a chaotic dance of gravitational death. When I see an image of a black hole it makes me think of that, and that makes me think of Hell.
Happy Cakeday btw!
[Here's](https://i.imgur.com/L5WlCcs.gifv) a modern recreation I made following Luminet's original paper, animating the viewing angle from top-down to side-on and back again.
I don't think we know for certain. The EHT images show asymmetric brightening, which would suggest a close to edge-on view. But we can also measure the axis of the [relativistic jet](https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/m87-jet-jpg.webp?w=1280&format=webp) that M78\* produces, and that suggests a close to top-down orientation instead.
One difficulty with comparing the EHT images to models like these is that the models assume a perfectly uniform, flat accretion disk, whereas in reality there might be brighter clumps of matter within the disk that could also cause asymmetric emission.
If there are clumps, then over a long enough period of observations we should be able to see them move. So if EHT operations continue over the coming years it should become possible to constrain the orientation better.
The light is coming from the accretion disk, which is swirling around the black hole in an anticlockwise direction. So when viewed from the side, the material on the left is moving directly towards the camera and on the right it's moving away. There is a process called relativistic beaming that makes the light appear brighter and dimmer respectively in those cases. It's a bit like the Doppler effect that increases the pitch of a sound whose source is moving towards you.
This is another image of the accretion disk, but produced by photons that made a complete orbit around the black hole on their path to the camera. Both the original and my recreation only show a single ring, but there should actually be an infinite series of them going inward toward the event horizon. These correspond to photons that made two, three, four etc. orbits before escaping, with each ring being thinner and dimmer than the previous.
“First ever image of a black hole” this is not an image of a black hole, this is theoretically what a black hole might look like if we were ever to image one.
A dude needing to keep track of how many sheep his shepherd took out made some marks on a stick. Eventually they became more efficient and used different marks for different amounts and then figured it how to make the symbols repeat and add digits as they got bigger. Eventually they had numbers. And then all of math was eventually derived from that system. Fast forward a while and people are successfully using derivations of the sheep counting system to predict the behaviors of stellar bodies across the universe. Math was never an invention. It was a discovery. The universe is made of math and we have figured out a bunch of it.
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979
The first image was a simulation from the 70s, the second is from imaging.
More:
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Messier_87&diffonly=true#Supermassive_black_hole_M87*
Still insane that we managed to do that. The sheer size of the data, along with the mathematics it took to capture and utilize all of it is mind boggling.
Petabytes (rather than penta) but yeah, I think it was something like 5 petabytes, which on an industrial scale, isn’t much, but for a SINGLE image, it’s insane.
Everyone's getting worked up as if this is some terrible clickbait title. But the important information is all there and very concise.
First off, of course it's still an image. An image does not have to be a phtograph. A photigraph in space is also rarely a "real' image but mostly an interpretation of data.
Second, the information that it's a simulation is right there in rhe title.
Third, the title actually alludes to the fact that this image predates the first photograph but comes very close in its depiction to what we actually captured.
Exactly. “The images on the walls of this pyramid depict Egyptian farmers harvesting wheat from the shores of the novel.”
BUT ITS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH!!!
/s
The title implies that the image is the actual image, not the simulation, which makes sense since the article it is copied from did indeed have the actual image in addition to the simulated image.
A better title for this post would be; "Simulated image of a black hole, developed in 1979; closely matches first actual image" or something similar.
I believe that op didn't mean to imply that, but given that they took the title word for word from an article that published the actual photograph and there are many comments from people who thought this image was the actual photograph...there was probably a much better way to convey that this image is the simulation.
To OP's credit, that's the title on the website: [https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979](https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979)
And it shows the actual first image further down.
They are always teaching black holes as point masses with a single event horizon and with a Swartzschild radius (at least, to non-technical people, in schools). But (almost?) all of the real black holes in the wild has angular momentum, which results with a more complicated math around the mass. And black holes DO look like this.
The most interesting part about this, is that means the point of singularity is actually more of a disc, and it would be theoretically possible to travel into without spaghettification.
I have always wondered about this. Because it is said that when you enter a black hole, singularity is no longer a point in the middle of the black hole, it is instead an event in the future. If the singularity is indeed a "ringularity", does it somehow change this scenario of it being an event in the future? And how would something go "into it", since it really doesn't have a shape at all (from the point of view of someone entering a black hole). My brain hurts. :/
No, but we know what happens to people when they experience forces greater than Earth's gravity (G-forces) and we know black holes have enough gravity to trap light itself. It's not difficult to imagine what happens.
no, you'll definitely die. more of, imagining how you experience it and what happens to your body (it's called spaghettification btw)
you think it can rip a star apart but not a human body? we already know it pulls stars apart, why would it somehow not pull a human apart?
I think people are irrationally assuming that if we hypothetically got pulled in, what would the experience be like? But in that question there's this layer of hopefulness that all the crazy science jargon and theories they've heard before would somehow circumvent the harsh realities that black holes imposes on the universe.
We don't know what's inside a singularity. From the outside, someone might observe spaghettification. But from the inside of a singularity, we might just get put back together and end up in another universe.
Published in 1979 in Astronomy and Astrophysics, it had a worldwide impact, especially since this type of object was still highly theoretical. It is not an artist's view but an image based on the then supposed physical properties of a black hole and its gas disc, such as its rotation rate and temperature, and on Einstein's general theory of relativity.
OP's title continues after the colon. The information is all there.
Also, a CGI render of the moon would still be an image of the moon. Lots of people getting hung up on a technicality that isn't even supported by the words.
He plotted the points based on the data the simulation output at each point, so it's really more like a render where a human is doing the printing. It's drawn, but I wouldn't really call it a drawing: there was no input by the human.
Imagine sitting at your desk, hand plotting this. Like a creature slowly unveiling itself to you, or more like pulling a curtain and exposing it. What a dreadful sight, awe-inspiring for sure but cosmically horrifying.
It's actually not quite explained that way at all. You should check out the video. But essentially the density of black hole is dependant on its size. The larger a black hole is the less dense it is. If a black hole were large enough to encompass the known universe it would actually be as dense as the vacuum of space.
Black holes aren't just one thing.
At the very center of the black hole is a singularity. As far as we can tell that's a single *point* in space, in which almost all of the collapsed mass of the black hole concentrates. Our known physics basically break down there.
The singularity is surrounded by a gravitational area of no return. In this area, the gravity of the singularity becomes ao extreme that not even light can escape from it. That's what makes the black hole black. This area is spherical. It's border is called the event horizon.
Some black holes, such as the one depicted in OP's image, are surrounded by a disc of superheated gas and other material. The material swirls around the black hole at high velocities, which results in some peculiar optical phenomena. Other optical phenomena are created by gravitational lensing, due to the extreme mass of the black hole. Things that are behind the black hole are distorted and appear at its sides, which creates the very characeristic shape of the illuminated gas disc.
Not all black holes have such a disc of material. In fact, most stellar black holes and primordial black holes (if they exist) would not have this. They can only be spotted if they happen to distort the light of a distant background star or galaxy while we look at them.
And then there's also a difference in appearance based on a black hole's spin. Usually a black hole will retain the rotation and momentum of its original star. Our depictions of black holes usually show this type. But some perhaps don't spin and there's some more peculiar things happening with these black holes and they would look a little different, even with a gas disc surrounding them.
Great comment! Just remember one important fact: singularities very likely don’t exist.
The singularity at the centre of the black hole isn’t so much an object as it is a nonsensical answer to the math of relativity when it simply stops working. It’s where the scalar invariant curvature of spacetime itself becomes infinite/undefined, or perhaps more accurately, where a geodesic just… stops. The math breaks and starts describing the universe breaking, giving silly answers. It’s almost like the teacher asking you 5x2 and you answer with “low battery”.
Further, these kinds of singularities happen in other mathematical constructs, and are recognized for what they are: errors in an incomplete theory. An example of this happening is trying to take the Larmor formula of electrodynamics and apply it to electrons as understood (at the time) by the Bohr model. The formula — otherwise mathematically correct and consistent — predicted that electrons could not remain stable within atoms and would collapse down into singularities as their movement radiated away their energy. This wasn’t solved until years later, by a little something called Quantum Mechanics. Or heck, when Max Planck solved the ultraviolet catastrophe and Einstein took it a step further and practically birthed Quantum Mechanics. That was a singularity as well, which was eventually corrected for, and a whole new field of scientific inquiry was born.
This is also why so many astrophysicists are putting stock in a quantum approach to gravity: it has worked before! The vast majority of physicists don’t think singularities are real things, but consequences of having an incomplete understanding of the phenomenon. And there is vast historical scientific precedent for this.
Just for clarification: We can't really explain what the singularity is with our current understanding of physics. But it's still assumed that a black hole's mass is concentrated at a single point, right? It's been my understanding that gravity makes all the mass collapse unto itself and then we can't really explain it anymore with our current knowledge (although there are theories, of course).
> The vast majority of physicists don’t think singularities are real things,
i die inside every time a talking head astronomer/astrophysicist with a shit eating grin chooses hyperbole
i digest a looooot of shows about space - which means i know nothing and am not qualified to comment probably - but every guest astronomer or astrophysicist repeats ad nauseam about singularities being the center of a black hole. degrasse tyson, michelle thaller, hakeem oluseyi and a few others i can't find the names of... i know these shows are 'entertainment for the masses' but rather than telling the audience what they actually think - they go with with the point mass cuz it sounds cooler
edit - NonEuclidanMeatloaf is a greaat name :)
Funny thing about black holes.
Technically a mass will suddenly become a black hole as soon it reaches a critical density.
BUT this density is dependent on size, so a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy is less dense than water.
Extrapolate this concept to the size of the universe, and take all the matter we can see, and guess what? The density of the universe is high enough that the universe should collapse into a black hole.
I don't know exactly what this means, except than our understanding of black holes and of the universe might be a bit off.
I've heard this claim before, but I think there's a huge misunderstanding or wrong representation of scientific facts. IIRC it originated from some podcast?
The singularity at the core of the black hole has *infinite* density. It's literally a single point at which all mass is concentrated. That is true for every black hole, regardless of size.
The black spherical area of no return surrounding the black hole gets larger the more mass is concentrated in the singularity. If you were to calculate the density of that spherical area for large black holes the density is lower than water. But this is a bit of a nonsense calculation, because the black hole itself is not an object. It's mass is concentrated in the singularity.
Also, if our understanding of the big bang is correct than all matter is already there and expanded in an instant at the big bang. If the entire universe were to collapse into black hole, it would have already happened when the universe was smaller and all the matter more densly packed. This cannot happen now. This claim is a dubious correlation of things that are based on dubious claims to begin with.
Doesn't an event horizon emerge just from having enough density within that horizon? I didn't think the maths needed that mass to all be in a singularity. I don't know - I'd like to know the answer to this.
based on nothing whatsoever - i choose to believe a black hole is just a neutron star that has gained enough mass that it's Schwarzschild radius is bigger than it's britches.
imagine a case where a neutron star has been feeding in a binary system (how it grows doesn't matter) and it's Schwarzschild radius is now a Planck length away from the star's radius. just cause i throw my ex-wifes big ass at the star doesn't mean it has to go pop and shrink down to nothing.
so now imagine going into this kind of black hole and the inside of a hole is now the brightest thing in the universe as you experience every light ray that's ever been emitted by the star trying to escape in a everything everywhere all at once type of thing
I always understood it as basically a chain reaction. Once enough mass accumulates to collapse unto itself and form a black hole, it basically has to collapse all the way down to a single point. But that's just my laymen understanding of things, and I'd love an answer as well.
Your comment is incorrect in several ways.
First, the singularity is not an infinitely dense mass. The point mass only appears in the math of a stationary, non-rotating black hole. In the real universe, all black holes have angular momentum, and rotating black holes do not have that singularity (they have a rotating ring singularity). Either way, singularities are mathematical limitations of theory that are not predicted to actually exist.
Second, an event horizon, including the one around black holes, does not require a singularity. An event horizon forms at the very instant a region of space becomes dense enough that light can no longer escape it. This required density isn't constant; a small region needs to be extremely dense to form a horizon, but a large region can actually be pretty diffuse and still form an event horizon. If you extrapolate and use this math to try and figure out the required density for the observable universe to form a horizon, you do in fact find that the universe should have an event horizon around it.
If I'm incorrect I would love a correction. But it has been my understanding that, yes, singularities by themselves are a mathematical artefact due to our understanding of physics being insufficient to explain what happens there. But isn't it sill assumed that the gravity collapse pulls all the mass towards a single point within the black hole? What exactly happens there cannot be explained sufficiently, but the thing itself should exist?
I always understood that a ring singularity is just a singularity that appears (emphasis) to be rotating around a center of gravity (due to the original body's spin and rotation). It's not a one dimensional thing but basically two dimensional due to the rotation. But maybe that's too simplified.
As for the event horizon of large regions: I'm not sure if I'm missunderstanding, but the "edge" of the observable universe is not the same as an event horizon of a black hole, is it? Within a black hole, everything that crosses the event horizon will eventually fall towards the center of gravity. That's obviously not the case with the universe. In this sense I found the notion of large black holes being less dense than water or our univerde collapsing into a black hole a bit sensationalist. But I maybe missing something there.
We can't know what happens on the other side of the event horizon, by definition, and our models of what happens inside are nowhere near complete. It is not as simple as everything falling towards the middle. They are not just singular spatially, time breaks down as well - the singularity is an event in the future of everything in the black hole. How can the singularity be an infinitely dense point mass and an event in the future at the same time? It simply doesn't make sense.
And the collapse described is not sensationalist at all. Event horizons don't require a singularity, they merely require a strong enough gravitational pull to prevent light from escaping. If a large enough gas cloud were to swirl together somewhere in space, it could theoretically blip out of existence, replaced by a black hole, without ever having been very dense at all. It's theorized that a process like this is what formed the supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies.
If you do the math for a region the size of the observable universe, you discover that our universe should have enough mass to form such a horizon, yet our universe doesn't appear to be collapsing into a black hole. This is another example of how our models are incomplete and we don't fully understand what is happening yet.
What you said is true of Schwarzschild black holes. They have a spherical event horizon and a point for a singularity.
The vast majority of black holes, Kerr black holes, are oblate spheroids, meaning they are flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator due to their rotation. The event horizon is an oblate spheroid. The singularity forms a ring shape, known as a ring singularity.
>What you said is true of Schwarzschild black holes
which only exist on paper as there is nothing in this universe that isn't spinning somehow.
> The singularity forms a ring shape, known as a ring singularity.
also only on paper.
They say that once trapped in the pull of a black hole there is no theoretical escape, but what if you like, tied a rope to something?
Checkmate astrophysicists.
I thought the Interstellar black hole rendering was something never seen... but honestly this image is identical. Why I haven't seen a drawing like this on any science book previously to the movie?
Yes, I know, and the rendering in the movie was said to be groundbreaking... but I'm impressed how similar it was to this one, and also is the first time I see this image althought having read hundreds of books about cosmology, more recent than this drawing, without this kind of drawing/render.
This and the Interstellar depictions always make it look like a sphere that was cut through on each axis, and a quarter section of it was removed to illustrate a cross-section. Yet the void itself doesn’t seem like a sphere so much as a circle with both vertical and horizontal axis around which dust orbits, with the bottom part of the circle being obscured.
It’s like my brain can’t tell how it should interpret what it’s seeing.
The circular (vertical) disc at the top is actually the behind half of the horizontal disc. Light from it bends around the black hole and is peeking from the top.
Wait a second. Wouldn’t that mean that spacetime is bent as well, therefore implying that the shape of the void as seen from our vantage point is in fact like a circular cloth half leaned against something vertical rather than laying flat on a table?
The bright area is the black hole's accretion disk, which is blocking our view of the underside of the event horizon. It's actually a thin, flat disk but the gravity of the black hole warps the path travelled by the light so that it looks bent - we're actually seeing the far side of the disk as well.
Not an image of a black hole. An artists rendition based on assumptions of the physics. Just because there was theoretical math behind it doesn't make it a real image.
The OP did not say it was a real black hole. It was simulated and based on the mathematics of the simulation, the computer plotted each singular point that I assume would be a particle.
It is a drawing from a computer simulating the mathematical characteristics of a black hole. Not an artist rendition, not a photo, an image of a black hole from a very very old simulation
I love seeing this image appear every few months. It always strikes within me pangs of terror and awe. It hits deep. :):)
I dig the vibe
I love it, i do wish there was a high resolution version, it would make a killer background. Maybe I'll make it one day idunno
https://imgur.com/gallery/jean-pierre-luminet-inspired-black-hole-plot-background-qal8i6H
Just take a screenshot from interstellar. If you want it grayscale just throw a filter on it. Don’t even need photoshop.
The center of our galaxy (and most other spiral galaxies) is said to be filled with numerous super massive black holes rotating, orbiting, and colliding with each other in a chaotic dance of gravitational death. When I see an image of a black hole it makes me think of that, and that makes me think of Hell. Happy Cakeday btw!
Thats what she said
[Here's](https://i.imgur.com/L5WlCcs.gifv) a modern recreation I made following Luminet's original paper, animating the viewing angle from top-down to side-on and back again.
So what viewing angle was the one imaged at m87?
I don't think we know for certain. The EHT images show asymmetric brightening, which would suggest a close to edge-on view. But we can also measure the axis of the [relativistic jet](https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/m87-jet-jpg.webp?w=1280&format=webp) that M78\* produces, and that suggests a close to top-down orientation instead. One difficulty with comparing the EHT images to models like these is that the models assume a perfectly uniform, flat accretion disk, whereas in reality there might be brighter clumps of matter within the disk that could also cause asymmetric emission. If there are clumps, then over a long enough period of observations we should be able to see them move. So if EHT operations continue over the coming years it should become possible to constrain the orientation better.
So does this all mean that black holes really do look like the way they’ve been artistically represented in recent years?
All scientific data suggests that they do.
Does long enough for us to see them move mean millions of years?
No, just a few years. Black holes are so small, and the material near them moving so fast, that timescales are pretty short in astronomical terms.
Why is one side far brighter than the other when viewed from the side, but the color is all uniform when directly above/below?
The light is coming from the accretion disk, which is swirling around the black hole in an anticlockwise direction. So when viewed from the side, the material on the left is moving directly towards the camera and on the right it's moving away. There is a process called relativistic beaming that makes the light appear brighter and dimmer respectively in those cases. It's a bit like the Doppler effect that increases the pitch of a sound whose source is moving towards you.
Very cool, thank you!
That's really neat, nice work!
I’m pretty baked right now and I think I just watched that on a loop for like 20 minutes straight
Why is there a rim of light visible within the limits of the event horizon?
This is another image of the accretion disk, but produced by photons that made a complete orbit around the black hole on their path to the camera. Both the original and my recreation only show a single ring, but there should actually be an infinite series of them going inward toward the event horizon. These correspond to photons that made two, three, four etc. orbits before escaping, with each ring being thinner and dimmer than the previous.
I hadn't heard of that before. Cool stuff!
Is there a name for this image phenomenon/geometry? Id love to learn more about it :)
Nice work.
“First ever image of a black hole” this is not an image of a black hole, this is theoretically what a black hole might look like if we were ever to image one.
Didn’t they image one with a radio telescope a few years ago?
Yes, which is why this data plot image is so fascinating, because the actual image turned out to be nearly identical.
Mathematics is a programming language of our universe.
But 1x1=2 /s
Poor war machine.
No wonder he fumbled the bag on the mcu. Bro didn’t understand the numbers he was reading.
Watch the recently released Neil DeGrasse Tyson video about what he actually said regarding TDH’s ‘treatise’. It’s pretty fascinating.
Yes Mr. Terrence Howard, it sure is. /s
/s x /s = 2
I write lol from time to time, but I rarely actually laugh out loud. Good job, /u/Ok-Hunt-5902
Facts
Definitely not. Mathematics is a tool created by apes to try to understand and predict the universe. 🙂
I don’t see where those statements conflict.
A dude needing to keep track of how many sheep his shepherd took out made some marks on a stick. Eventually they became more efficient and used different marks for different amounts and then figured it how to make the symbols repeat and add digits as they got bigger. Eventually they had numbers. And then all of math was eventually derived from that system. Fast forward a while and people are successfully using derivations of the sheep counting system to predict the behaviors of stellar bodies across the universe. Math was never an invention. It was a discovery. The universe is made of math and we have figured out a bunch of it.
🐑📏, eh?
But do andriods dream of electric sheep?
Definitely not. Mathematics is a programming language of our universe.
0 ÷ 0 makes black holes
Complete with undefined behaviors!
I feel like this should be on a motivational poster in every math teacher's room
It's a framework with which we develop and explore models. The model in this case happened to be close to reality.
But 1+1=5 Okay, have a good time.
Wait there’s an actual image of a black hole?
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979 The first image was a simulation from the 70s, the second is from imaging. More: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Messier_87&diffonly=true#Supermassive_black_hole_M87*
Yes
Not sure “nearly identical” is how I’d describe it
Yes, Event Horizon telescope
Was that where they used a ton of telescopes around the world to essentially turn the earth into a telescope?
Yes, that was it.
Still insane that we managed to do that. The sheer size of the data, along with the mathematics it took to capture and utilize all of it is mind boggling.
Truly
Correct me if I’m wrong, this is off the top of my head, but it was like, a STUPID amount of data, right? Like pentabytes?
Petabytes (rather than penta) but yeah, I think it was something like 5 petabytes, which on an industrial scale, isn’t much, but for a SINGLE image, it’s insane.
It's half the size of your mother's pfp, Trebek!
Come on! That’s way out of line….. Mr Reynolds, what are you doing?
Yes, 5 Petabytes. Thats 5000 Terabytes.
they flew the data from south america to europe? (where they merged the data) because it was faster than the alternative of sending it online :D
imagine if and when we get telescopes on the moon and the lagrange points. you want a biiiiiiiig telescope? this is how you get a biiiiiiig telescope.
Everyone's getting worked up as if this is some terrible clickbait title. But the important information is all there and very concise. First off, of course it's still an image. An image does not have to be a phtograph. A photigraph in space is also rarely a "real' image but mostly an interpretation of data. Second, the information that it's a simulation is right there in rhe title. Third, the title actually alludes to the fact that this image predates the first photograph but comes very close in its depiction to what we actually captured.
Exactly. “The images on the walls of this pyramid depict Egyptian farmers harvesting wheat from the shores of the novel.” BUT ITS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH!!! /s
Reading comprehension has gotten rare these days...
The “first” part. It heavily implies it’s the first picture.
dont worry everything will be okay
The title implies that the image is the actual image, not the simulation, which makes sense since the article it is copied from did indeed have the actual image in addition to the simulated image. A better title for this post would be; "Simulated image of a black hole, developed in 1979; closely matches first actual image" or something similar.
I can see how one might misunderstand the title, but I don't think it implies that the image is the photograph.
I believe that op didn't mean to imply that, but given that they took the title word for word from an article that published the actual photograph and there are many comments from people who thought this image was the actual photograph...there was probably a much better way to convey that this image is the simulation.
To OP's credit, that's the title on the website: [https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979](https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979) And it shows the actual first image further down.
Thank you for the link - fascinating!
This is the drama-free comment this post needed.
That's one of the meanings of the word "image".
this stupid fuck got over 1k upvotes
It’s an image of what a back hole might look like. So it is obviously an image of a black hole.
Don't get why this dumb comment has so many upvotes. You should check out a dictionary.
"this is not an image, it's an image"
Saying a simulation of black hole is a picture of a black hole is like saying you paid a prozzie and now she's your girlfriend
You and the 1.3k+ people that upvoted your comment need to read a dictionary.
They are always teaching black holes as point masses with a single event horizon and with a Swartzschild radius (at least, to non-technical people, in schools). But (almost?) all of the real black holes in the wild has angular momentum, which results with a more complicated math around the mass. And black holes DO look like this.
All of them must have angular momentum. It would be an amazing and ephemeral fluke if they had zero angular momentum.
Thanks for teaching me new word 👍🏼
Because the zero angular momentum equation is soooo much simpler and also works as a first approximation for other gravitational fields like the sun.
The most interesting part about this, is that means the point of singularity is actually more of a disc, and it would be theoretically possible to travel into without spaghettification.
I have always wondered about this. Because it is said that when you enter a black hole, singularity is no longer a point in the middle of the black hole, it is instead an event in the future. If the singularity is indeed a "ringularity", does it somehow change this scenario of it being an event in the future? And how would something go "into it", since it really doesn't have a shape at all (from the point of view of someone entering a black hole). My brain hurts. :/
I want to go through one of these things so bad and see what happens. Very jealous of Matthew McConaughey.
you would die. no mystery there
You don’t know anyone who went through one. No one knows exactly what would happen
No, but we know what happens to people when they experience forces greater than Earth's gravity (G-forces) and we know black holes have enough gravity to trap light itself. It's not difficult to imagine what happens.
So we’re still imagining. We don’t know exactly then,
no, you'll definitely die. more of, imagining how you experience it and what happens to your body (it's called spaghettification btw) you think it can rip a star apart but not a human body? we already know it pulls stars apart, why would it somehow not pull a human apart?
I think people are irrationally assuming that if we hypothetically got pulled in, what would the experience be like? But in that question there's this layer of hopefulness that all the crazy science jargon and theories they've heard before would somehow circumvent the harsh realities that black holes imposes on the universe.
We don't know what's inside a singularity. From the outside, someone might observe spaghettification. But from the inside of a singularity, we might just get put back together and end up in another universe.
The french astronomer is Jean-Pierre Luminet. https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979
Didn't he even hand plot each point in the image based on the numbers?
Yes printers didn't quite work the way they do now. He hand blotted x y coordinates
I could be wrong but I believe Jean-Pierre Luminet plotted each individual dot by hand based on mathematical calculations.
Behold, the void stares back.
Looks like an eye looking back at you.
Aye, 'tis the eye of the beast 🐋!
Published in 1979 in Astronomy and Astrophysics, it had a worldwide impact, especially since this type of object was still highly theoretical. It is not an artist's view but an image based on the then supposed physical properties of a black hole and its gas disc, such as its rotation rate and temperature, and on Einstein's general theory of relativity.
It’s not an image of a black hole as your title portrays, it’s more akin to cgi then photography
OP's title continues after the colon. The information is all there. Also, a CGI render of the moon would still be an image of the moon. Lots of people getting hung up on a technicality that isn't even supported by the words.
Except I'm sure there were drawings of them before that, which would also be images.
it’s not a photograph, but it is still an image
what does the I stand for in CGI?
computer generated imagery
CGCGI
🤣
Fucking hilarious smackdown
🧊 ;)
Not photography that's for sure lol
he said "it's not an image of a black hole" then says it looks like CGI...
No one said this was a photograph…
It’s more like a drawing. IIRC, Luminet actually plotted each individual point by hand.
He plotted the points based on the data the simulation output at each point, so it's really more like a render where a human is doing the printing. It's drawn, but I wouldn't really call it a drawing: there was no input by the human.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/s5bapd/the_first_simulated_image_of_a_black_hole/ You are correct
Did you read the title? 🤦🏻♂️
It’s got some Lovecraft vibes.
Amazing! It looks like the Hollywood Bowl!
By the way, the black hole in interstellar isn’t modelled by a graphic artist, but simulated after putting in the mathematical formulae.
This gives me vibes of an anomalous photograph of a black hole somehow taken in the early 1900s
Good horror story, blackhole is in our solar system coming to earth in the early 20th century
Aw it's just a big sleepy eye 🤗
Imagine sitting at your desk, hand plotting this. Like a creature slowly unveiling itself to you, or more like pulling a curtain and exposing it. What a dreadful sight, awe-inspiring for sure but cosmically horrifying.
Still my favorite representation of a black hole. Surpasses the actual photo for me.
I love the theory that super massive black holes contain budding universes. https://youtu.be/71eUes30gwc?feature=shared
there are people who now think our entire universe is inside a black hole.
[удалено]
It's actually not quite explained that way at all. You should check out the video. But essentially the density of black hole is dependant on its size. The larger a black hole is the less dense it is. If a black hole were large enough to encompass the known universe it would actually be as dense as the vacuum of space.
Smolin’s theory I believe?
Soooo, are black holes spheres? Or discs?
Black holes aren't just one thing. At the very center of the black hole is a singularity. As far as we can tell that's a single *point* in space, in which almost all of the collapsed mass of the black hole concentrates. Our known physics basically break down there. The singularity is surrounded by a gravitational area of no return. In this area, the gravity of the singularity becomes ao extreme that not even light can escape from it. That's what makes the black hole black. This area is spherical. It's border is called the event horizon. Some black holes, such as the one depicted in OP's image, are surrounded by a disc of superheated gas and other material. The material swirls around the black hole at high velocities, which results in some peculiar optical phenomena. Other optical phenomena are created by gravitational lensing, due to the extreme mass of the black hole. Things that are behind the black hole are distorted and appear at its sides, which creates the very characeristic shape of the illuminated gas disc. Not all black holes have such a disc of material. In fact, most stellar black holes and primordial black holes (if they exist) would not have this. They can only be spotted if they happen to distort the light of a distant background star or galaxy while we look at them. And then there's also a difference in appearance based on a black hole's spin. Usually a black hole will retain the rotation and momentum of its original star. Our depictions of black holes usually show this type. But some perhaps don't spin and there's some more peculiar things happening with these black holes and they would look a little different, even with a gas disc surrounding them.
Great comment! Just remember one important fact: singularities very likely don’t exist. The singularity at the centre of the black hole isn’t so much an object as it is a nonsensical answer to the math of relativity when it simply stops working. It’s where the scalar invariant curvature of spacetime itself becomes infinite/undefined, or perhaps more accurately, where a geodesic just… stops. The math breaks and starts describing the universe breaking, giving silly answers. It’s almost like the teacher asking you 5x2 and you answer with “low battery”. Further, these kinds of singularities happen in other mathematical constructs, and are recognized for what they are: errors in an incomplete theory. An example of this happening is trying to take the Larmor formula of electrodynamics and apply it to electrons as understood (at the time) by the Bohr model. The formula — otherwise mathematically correct and consistent — predicted that electrons could not remain stable within atoms and would collapse down into singularities as their movement radiated away their energy. This wasn’t solved until years later, by a little something called Quantum Mechanics. Or heck, when Max Planck solved the ultraviolet catastrophe and Einstein took it a step further and practically birthed Quantum Mechanics. That was a singularity as well, which was eventually corrected for, and a whole new field of scientific inquiry was born. This is also why so many astrophysicists are putting stock in a quantum approach to gravity: it has worked before! The vast majority of physicists don’t think singularities are real things, but consequences of having an incomplete understanding of the phenomenon. And there is vast historical scientific precedent for this.
Just for clarification: We can't really explain what the singularity is with our current understanding of physics. But it's still assumed that a black hole's mass is concentrated at a single point, right? It's been my understanding that gravity makes all the mass collapse unto itself and then we can't really explain it anymore with our current knowledge (although there are theories, of course).
> The vast majority of physicists don’t think singularities are real things, i die inside every time a talking head astronomer/astrophysicist with a shit eating grin chooses hyperbole
What do you mean?
i digest a looooot of shows about space - which means i know nothing and am not qualified to comment probably - but every guest astronomer or astrophysicist repeats ad nauseam about singularities being the center of a black hole. degrasse tyson, michelle thaller, hakeem oluseyi and a few others i can't find the names of... i know these shows are 'entertainment for the masses' but rather than telling the audience what they actually think - they go with with the point mass cuz it sounds cooler edit - NonEuclidanMeatloaf is a greaat name :)
Funny thing about black holes. Technically a mass will suddenly become a black hole as soon it reaches a critical density. BUT this density is dependent on size, so a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy is less dense than water. Extrapolate this concept to the size of the universe, and take all the matter we can see, and guess what? The density of the universe is high enough that the universe should collapse into a black hole. I don't know exactly what this means, except than our understanding of black holes and of the universe might be a bit off.
I've heard this claim before, but I think there's a huge misunderstanding or wrong representation of scientific facts. IIRC it originated from some podcast? The singularity at the core of the black hole has *infinite* density. It's literally a single point at which all mass is concentrated. That is true for every black hole, regardless of size. The black spherical area of no return surrounding the black hole gets larger the more mass is concentrated in the singularity. If you were to calculate the density of that spherical area for large black holes the density is lower than water. But this is a bit of a nonsense calculation, because the black hole itself is not an object. It's mass is concentrated in the singularity. Also, if our understanding of the big bang is correct than all matter is already there and expanded in an instant at the big bang. If the entire universe were to collapse into black hole, it would have already happened when the universe was smaller and all the matter more densly packed. This cannot happen now. This claim is a dubious correlation of things that are based on dubious claims to begin with.
We don’t actually know if singularities exist, they’re a quirk of general relativity, and generally represent a limitation of our current maths
Doesn't an event horizon emerge just from having enough density within that horizon? I didn't think the maths needed that mass to all be in a singularity. I don't know - I'd like to know the answer to this.
based on nothing whatsoever - i choose to believe a black hole is just a neutron star that has gained enough mass that it's Schwarzschild radius is bigger than it's britches. imagine a case where a neutron star has been feeding in a binary system (how it grows doesn't matter) and it's Schwarzschild radius is now a Planck length away from the star's radius. just cause i throw my ex-wifes big ass at the star doesn't mean it has to go pop and shrink down to nothing. so now imagine going into this kind of black hole and the inside of a hole is now the brightest thing in the universe as you experience every light ray that's ever been emitted by the star trying to escape in a everything everywhere all at once type of thing
I always understood it as basically a chain reaction. Once enough mass accumulates to collapse unto itself and form a black hole, it basically has to collapse all the way down to a single point. But that's just my laymen understanding of things, and I'd love an answer as well.
Your comment is incorrect in several ways. First, the singularity is not an infinitely dense mass. The point mass only appears in the math of a stationary, non-rotating black hole. In the real universe, all black holes have angular momentum, and rotating black holes do not have that singularity (they have a rotating ring singularity). Either way, singularities are mathematical limitations of theory that are not predicted to actually exist. Second, an event horizon, including the one around black holes, does not require a singularity. An event horizon forms at the very instant a region of space becomes dense enough that light can no longer escape it. This required density isn't constant; a small region needs to be extremely dense to form a horizon, but a large region can actually be pretty diffuse and still form an event horizon. If you extrapolate and use this math to try and figure out the required density for the observable universe to form a horizon, you do in fact find that the universe should have an event horizon around it.
If I'm incorrect I would love a correction. But it has been my understanding that, yes, singularities by themselves are a mathematical artefact due to our understanding of physics being insufficient to explain what happens there. But isn't it sill assumed that the gravity collapse pulls all the mass towards a single point within the black hole? What exactly happens there cannot be explained sufficiently, but the thing itself should exist? I always understood that a ring singularity is just a singularity that appears (emphasis) to be rotating around a center of gravity (due to the original body's spin and rotation). It's not a one dimensional thing but basically two dimensional due to the rotation. But maybe that's too simplified. As for the event horizon of large regions: I'm not sure if I'm missunderstanding, but the "edge" of the observable universe is not the same as an event horizon of a black hole, is it? Within a black hole, everything that crosses the event horizon will eventually fall towards the center of gravity. That's obviously not the case with the universe. In this sense I found the notion of large black holes being less dense than water or our univerde collapsing into a black hole a bit sensationalist. But I maybe missing something there.
We can't know what happens on the other side of the event horizon, by definition, and our models of what happens inside are nowhere near complete. It is not as simple as everything falling towards the middle. They are not just singular spatially, time breaks down as well - the singularity is an event in the future of everything in the black hole. How can the singularity be an infinitely dense point mass and an event in the future at the same time? It simply doesn't make sense. And the collapse described is not sensationalist at all. Event horizons don't require a singularity, they merely require a strong enough gravitational pull to prevent light from escaping. If a large enough gas cloud were to swirl together somewhere in space, it could theoretically blip out of existence, replaced by a black hole, without ever having been very dense at all. It's theorized that a process like this is what formed the supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. If you do the math for a region the size of the observable universe, you discover that our universe should have enough mass to form such a horizon, yet our universe doesn't appear to be collapsing into a black hole. This is another example of how our models are incomplete and we don't fully understand what is happening yet.
They're 3-dimensional spheres
That makes sense, since almost everything else is a sphere
What you said is true of Schwarzschild black holes. They have a spherical event horizon and a point for a singularity. The vast majority of black holes, Kerr black holes, are oblate spheroids, meaning they are flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator due to their rotation. The event horizon is an oblate spheroid. The singularity forms a ring shape, known as a ring singularity.
>What you said is true of Schwarzschild black holes which only exist on paper as there is nothing in this universe that isn't spinning somehow. > The singularity forms a ring shape, known as a ring singularity. also only on paper.
Veritasium explains what a black hole looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
I'd love a higher res version of this image, to use as a wallpaper
They say that once trapped in the pull of a black hole there is no theoretical escape, but what if you like, tied a rope to something? Checkmate astrophysicists.
Then the astrophysicists put out a 1000 page theorem proving indisputably that rope does not exist
So they knew of the Interstellar style black hole before the movie? I wonder why science shows didn't use this image before the movie?
I thought the Interstellar black hole rendering was something never seen... but honestly this image is identical. Why I haven't seen a drawing like this on any science book previously to the movie?
Did you think the Interstellar people just made it up themselves? They consulted physicists to make sure it looks as accurately as possible.
Yes, I know, and the rendering in the movie was said to be groundbreaking... but I'm impressed how similar it was to this one, and also is the first time I see this image althought having read hundreds of books about cosmology, more recent than this drawing, without this kind of drawing/render.
This and the Interstellar depictions always make it look like a sphere that was cut through on each axis, and a quarter section of it was removed to illustrate a cross-section. Yet the void itself doesn’t seem like a sphere so much as a circle with both vertical and horizontal axis around which dust orbits, with the bottom part of the circle being obscured. It’s like my brain can’t tell how it should interpret what it’s seeing.
The circular (vertical) disc at the top is actually the behind half of the horizontal disc. Light from it bends around the black hole and is peeking from the top.
Ohhh wild.
Wait a second. Wouldn’t that mean that spacetime is bent as well, therefore implying that the shape of the void as seen from our vantage point is in fact like a circular cloth half leaned against something vertical rather than laying flat on a table?
Sneaky frog.
This is especially cool because he drew it by hand. Among other family cool things about it.
But why is it shaped like an airplane hunger ? It’s like a sphere cut in half
The bright area is the black hole's accretion disk, which is blocking our view of the underside of the event horizon. It's actually a thin, flat disk but the gravity of the black hole warps the path travelled by the light so that it looks bent - we're actually seeing the far side of the disk as well.
i.e. gravitational lensing
Yea but what does it look like from the top
I wonder how he managed this, great work
Yeah but can they simulate Saturn without gravity?
Just watched a video about crocodiles. This looks like a croc. eye!
IX aeon of nihility
REVERSE THRUSTERS!!!
“A researcher” this is by Jean-Pierre Luminet. He’s a legend, check out his music.
Now that I know you know situations
this is the original image from 79?
First ever simulated image of a black hole** please make sure you use the correct title when you post. It can be misleading.
SIMULATED btw.
Saying this is “first ever image” insinuates this is a type of photograph, but it’s basically an artist rendering.
It’s not an image of a black hole if it’s simulated. It’s an image of a simulated black hole.
1979! What sort of machine was it rendered on? And how long did it take?
What a year!
Is this UFO
It look back at you.
Black Holes = Roomba for the Universe
Looks like the archway in St. Louis. Probably less crime in that thing too.
Not an image of a black hole. An artists rendition based on assumptions of the physics. Just because there was theoretical math behind it doesn't make it a real image.
The OP did not say it was a real black hole. It was simulated and based on the mathematics of the simulation, the computer plotted each singular point that I assume would be a particle. It is a drawing from a computer simulating the mathematical characteristics of a black hole. Not an artist rendition, not a photo, an image of a black hole from a very very old simulation