BLACK HOLE PICTURE!!!!!

[Lunamor she/her]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!! We finally got a picture of a black hole!!!

[Truthless of Shinovar he/him]

IT'S HERE!! After almost a century of waiting after Einstein's Theory of Relativity, we have rock-solid PROOF (again)!

[TheGirlWhoLookedUp she/her]

Wooooohoooo! As a big science geek I can’t hide how excited I am about this. Do you know how big this black hole is?

[Lunamor she/her]

A picture from further out is even better!!!!!

Edit: @TheGirlWhoLookedUp, it is 40 billion kilometers across, or 3 million times the size of earth.

Edited April 11, 2019 by Lunamor

[TheGirlWhoLookedUp she/her]

That’s really incredible!

[+ZincAboutIt she/her]

That tiny pinprick of darkness is the most unsettling thing I've ever seen, wow. Super cool.

[Lunamor she/her]

You can see the light getting sucked into it!!!! It’s amazing and beautiful and awesome and AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Edited April 11, 2019 by Lunamor

[Pagliacci he/him]

I feel really small all of a sudden. This is really cool.

[Lunamor she/her]

I just saw that they likely will be unable to get more pictures until at least 2020. 

[TheGirlWhoLookedUp she/her]

2020 is apparently the golden year. Stormlight 4 and black hole pictures.

[AonEne he/him]

Okay, that's just awesome.

[Queen’sWit she/her]

Woah. Coming from someone who knows next to nothing about black holes, (except something about spaghetti or the likes) this is pretty cool!

[SwordNimiForPresident the sword/that sword]

2 hours ago, TheGirlWhoLookedUp said:

Wooooohoooo! As a big science geek I can’t hide how excited I am about this. Do you know how big this black hole is?

According to the study that took the picture it's 6.5 billion M☉ (6.5 billion times our sun's mass)

Here's the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87

Edit: That link is to the galaxy. The black hole part is in the Components section. It is designated M87*.

Edited April 11, 2019 by SwordNimiForPresident

[Rebecca she/her]

Wow! That’s super cool!

[+Invocation]

Fun fact about this discovery: it was mostly due to a pair of graduate students that the image was able to be captured. 

One's name is Katie Bouman, and she needed 8 racks of hard drives, each with 8 drives in them to store all the data from the image, and she was mostly in charge of the data managing and putting together the image itself.

The other was Andrew Chael, who helped calibrate the sensors and set the data collection sequence up, along with a rough structure.

5 petabytes of information went into this photo. Insane.

Edited April 11, 2019 by Invocation

[Pagliacci he/him]

One ring (of fire) to rule them all...

[Vogelsang he/him]

*happy science noises*

[+Ark1002]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[overlord stick]

That's incredible!

[Silva]

*feels really really really small.*

Black holes are terrifying. 

[+Doomstick he/him]

heh heh heh

[Sherlock Holmes he/him]

Oh, look, Sauron finally decided to show back up.

[ShadowLord_Lith he/him]

This is beautiful... It's like we've gotten a glimpse of the future end of the universe- a blackness slowly spreading from the center as mass grows too little to support itself in an ever-expanding universe. 

Or like a picture of a flower- a beautiful, unique snapshot of just how amazing the universe can be.

[SwordNimiForPresident the sword/that sword]

On 4/11/2019 at 11:16 AM, Ark1002 said:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I think that might actually be the sound you make as you cross the event horizon. You can see how the E's get closer together as time dilates. Need more testing to confirm.

[+Invocation]

11 minutes ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

I think that might actually be the sound you make as you cross the event horizon. You can see how the E's get closer together as time dilates. Need more testing to confirm.

No, because the Es would be breaking into single lines. Spaghettification.