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Attached are some older pictures of blackholes that predate the one released today, they are real, not simulations. Enjoy.
Just a reminder. Today's "first-ever" picture of a blackhole is not the first-ever. We have countless pictures of blackholes. This is just the first time we have been able to resolve the event horizon such that it takes up more than a single pixel. But like with all blackholes the blackhole itself is invisible and all you can see is the gravitational lensing around it. Something we have had for decades now.
It isnt the first ever photo of a blackhole, it is just the highest resolution of a blackhole we have.
@freemo Fair enough and the EHT guys really are billing it as "the first image of a black hole."
Still ... resolving the shadow and event horizon of a black hole at a distance of 55 million light years with an interferometer that has a baseline roughly the size of the diameter of the earth ... that's pretty cool, wouldn't you say?
Is it too much to start hoping for interferometric imaging with telescopes at the Lagrangian points around the earth? I'm still fuzzy on whether and how observational frequency limits the size of the interferometer.
@RomeoTBravo It is extremely cool and very amazing indeed. I am just a stickler for accuracy is all.
As I understand it interferometry isnt just about how far apart your constituent telescopes are but how many of them you have as well. If you really want to have useful interferometry in space you'd need a cloud of telescopes. Doable, but a bit more expensive. It also would have to orbit since just having one at each lagrange point wouldnt help as much.