Doeleman explains how Event Horizon Telescope captured first black hole images
Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman discusses the international collaboration that turned Earth into a world-sized telescope to image black holes.
What to know
- Shep Doeleman led 250 researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope—radio telescopes linked globally—to capture the first images of black hole shadows in M87 and the galactic center.
- The technique required unprecedented international collaboration to turn Earth itself into a world-sized telescope capable of imaging objects billions of kilometers away.
- Black hole movies may be possible by the early 2030s, advancing from static images to dynamic observations of these phenomena.
Black holes are visible because of luminous accretion disk material and surrounding plasma being energized by gravitational distortion.
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“Black holes power some of the brightest things in the universe - light so powerful that it sometimes has its own gravity.”
lopsotronic · Hacker News ↗
Classical Newtonian gravity remarkably predicts many black hole properties that general relativity also predicts, differing mainly in interpretation.
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“One of the most remarkable aspects of physics is that Newtonian gravity calculations are quite spot on for all the parts of black holes layfolk consider important.”
rustyhancock · Hacker News ↗
Supermassive black holes have counterintuitive properties: lower mass density at larger scales and finite density within the event horizon.
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“the mass density inside the event horizon never exceeds neutron star levels, and becomes in fact lower the heavier the black hole gets”
myrmidon · Hacker News ↗
“Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and a team of 250 researchers achieved this extraordinary feat by linking a group of radio telescopes around the world.”
Quanta Magazine · Quanta Magazine ↗
Shep Doeleman Harvard astrophysicist, Event Horizon Telescope lead
Janna Levin Co-host, podcast interviewerEvent Horizon Telescope Global observatory network
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Hacker News audience engages with black hole imaging discussion
The Quanta article gains traction on Hacker News with 55 points and 44 comments, prompting technical discussion from readers about black hole physics, imaging methodology, and theoretical implications. Comments explore the relationship between Newtonian and general relativistic predictions, the role of accretion disk luminosity in visibility, and properties of supermassive black holes.
“the mass density inside the event horizon never exceeds neutron star levels, and becomes in fact lower the heavier the black hole gets…”
— myrmidon, Hacker News commenter · source -
there's a serious group of astrophysicists that actually disagree the photo was assembled properly at alllong paper made short I think their carefully demonstrated argument is it's a machine-learning hallucination to see what we wantDr. Becky has excellent coverage of it, will link it in a moment when I find ithere it is, well worth watching:*…
2 more of the top 3 · 15 posts in this stretch
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Q
What’s next after taking the first images of a black hole? For astrophysicist Shep Doeleman, it’s making movies: “By the early 2030s, I think we’ll have real movies of an event horizon.” Get the full story on The Joy of Why: https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ how-do-you-take-a-picture-of-a-black-hole/id1608948873?i=1000798685771
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Easy. Space isn't empty.Due to the insane distortion of "space"[1], every spare molecule in the vicinity is going to be lighting up at the speed of $E = mc^2$ . Which tends to be real visible. Black holes power some of the brightest things in the universe - light so powerful that it sometimes has its own gravity.A tame black hole is possibly the…
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Quanta publishes podcast episode on black hole imaging with Doeleman
Quanta Magazine releases a podcast episode featuring Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and co-host Janna Levin discussing how the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first images of black holes. Doeleman led a team of 250 researchers who linked radio telescopes worldwide to produce images of a supermassive black hole in galaxy M87 (55 million light-years away) and the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
“Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope the size of the world, and why the next goal is to create a movie.”
— Quanta Magazine -
first by HN Frontpage, 9d ago · also Quanta
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first by Mastodon, 10d ago
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What people are saying 12 voices from 1 site · best of 15 · verbatim
- Oct 31
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We don't know if a black hole's singularity actually has infinite density because the volume being 0 means the density is undefined as division by 0 is undefined.
- Oct 30
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The event horizon isn't the black hole. It's just the point of no return. As far as we know the black hole is a singularity with infinite density. But that probably isn't true. It's just a model and the model isn't perfect
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> the mass density inside the event horizonIs not a well-defined number. The number you are calculating assumes that the horizon is an ordinary 2-sphere enclosing an ordinary 3-sphere in Euclidean space, and divides the hole's mass by the calculated volume of that 3-sphere. But the spacetime of a black hole doesn't work that way. The "space"…
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Of course, they didn't actually take a picture of a black hole. They took a picture of the matter surrounding it...
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I never thought about this, but I guess it makes sense. What an insane thing to consider - one more reason for to love neutron stars.
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The event horizon radius grows linearly, so it's possible for a black hole to have a lower density than water (around 7 billion solar masses). Another curiosity is that if you plug in the mass of the regular matter in the observable universe into the schwarzchild radius equation (R = 2GM/(c^2)) you get a black hole event horizon larger than the…
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I can't think of a way of getting a singularity. As soon as the mass in a region of space becomes high enough to start a black hole, time would freeze and it would take several millions universe lifetimes for the mass to fully collapse into itself, no matter how close of far the observer is to the mass. The way I see it, things would go on as…
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Some of.the biggest ones woild float on water... which tells you its not very useful to compare density based on Schwarzschild radius
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presumably the only way to get a good picture of a blackhole would be to get very lucky and catch a supernova going off next door, preferably at a slight oblique angle from one of the poles and be able to light the acretion disk and any dust but I dont think we have the visible light gathering capacity to search at the distances required for even…
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For large blackholes of course. And this actually makes other interesting property. Our universe is in fact giant blackhole with our own event horizon outside it. This also support cyclic big bang theory. Once entire universe will collapse to singularity, the smallest possible particles shatters, leaving pure energy. Pure energy doesnt have…
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What I find really interesting is that black holes don't really "require" infinite density; the mass density inside the event horizon never exceeds neutron star levels, and becomes in fact lower the heavier the black hole gets (=> event horizon enclosed volume grows faster than mass).
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One of the most remarkable aspects of physics is that Newtonian gravity calculations are quite spot on for all the parts of black holes layfolk consider important.1. Both predict the same critical radius, now called the Schwarzschild radius.2. Both predict a central singularity with formally infinite density in idealised collapse.3. Both predict…