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 1px is not an image.
@raucao By that logic we have never seen any pictures of extraterrestrial stars either (aside from beetleguese).
But even then its more complex than that. Blackholes themselves can never be seen no matter how many pixels they resolve to. The only thing we can see is the einstein rings they cause. Those have taken up many pixels in the past just as they did in the most recent picture.
So still not the "first" no matter how you slice it.
@raucao Well I wouldnt say its splitting hairs. Its applying the same definition we use for stars when we use the word "seen" in astronomy. We see light, filtered through light-years of interstellar gas, that resolves to less than a pixel for the actual object (the star). Same is true of the blackhole, we see the light that shows the blackhole, but the blackhole itself resolves to less than a pixel.
And no, when you look at stars none of them are greater than a pixel when you look with your eye. Telescopes can do it but only for a few very rare stars. When Beetlegeuse could be resolved beyond 1 pixel it was a HUGE deal.
I assume you dont read many astronomical/physics scientific journals.
Don/'t take my word when it comes to the "absurd" assertion. Here is a voice recording with a scientist She talks about and confirms all the points I said about stars being unable to be resolved in photos (they act as point sources, sub-pixel sizes).
Here read this section of the transcript it talks about how we cant resolve ANY stars with a single telescope and there are VERY few stars we have resolved and in all those cases it used interferometry and multiple telescopes. You know exactly like the "absurd" assertion I made earlier. Also here is the full link.
http://www.astronomycast.com/2012/04/ep-256-resolution/
Pamela: Well, it would be able to detect it because thereâs still light coming off â so this is one of those things in astronomy that can get confusing at times. You have a light source, itâs radiating light, all of that light quite happily hits a pixel, and thereâs a difference between whether or not you detect it, and whether or not you resolve it, so youâre able to detect that light, but youâre not able to resolve it into, âwell, what does that look like? Whatâs the shape of that?â So weâre able to detect things like stars. We canât resolve stars, but we detect them all the time, and so this is the difference between pretty picture, and blob of light â and mostly we just see blobs of light.
Fraser: Right, all of theâŚso even with the Hubble space telescope, if youâre going to view a distant star, youâre just going to get the light coming off of it, but youâre not going to resolve the disk. But thereâs a few cases, right, where the resolution of the detector is good enough that you actually can resolve the disk, right? Hasnât, like, Betelgeuse been resolved?
Pamela: Betelgeuse has been resolved; weâve resolved the stars in the Alpha Centauri system, and in all of these cases, it wasnât one single telescope doing the job â and this is where it gets tricky. The ability of a telescope to resolve an image is based on two different factors (weâre going to keep having things that are based on two different factors today): one of those factors is what color of light are youâre using. If the color of light youâre using has a really long wavelength, well, if your wavelength is longer than the object youâre trying to look at, the wavelength isnât going to allow you to resolve the object. So you need to use shorter wavelengths of light to be able to resolve finer details. Now, at the same time, you have to be able to take all of those wavelengths and combine them in a meaningful way, and the more wavelengths you can combine, the better youâre going to do, and the more wavelengths you can combine depends on how big is your detector. Now, this starts to work in a kind of screwball way because itâs not actually âI have one, two, three, four, five stacked across and Iâm collecting all five.â It actually has to do with the separation between these two is, well, actually usually 1000s of wavelengths, and I can cut a hole out of the center, or I can actually cut a whole lot of holes out, and we call that the very large array in New Mexico. So the resolution that you get depends on how far apart are the two most extreme wavelengths that you detect in your baseline between the two telescopes, and so that baseline, or the diameter of your single mirror, your single dish â that defines your resolution in combination with what wavelength youâre looking at.
@freemo That is an epic exercise in hairsplitting. Agree to disagree, but all that confirms what I see as splitting hairs in that case.