X-ray diffraction reveals details inside mummies without having to open them up, Physicist creates N95-type respirators using cotton candy machine, Springer Nature announces plan for open access publishing of research papers, Amateur astronomer Alberto Caballero finds possible source of Wow! My understanding of black holes is not deep enough to figure out how explain these issues properly at the moment in a non-technical fashion; you may find more success with Sean Carroll, whose an expert on general relativity and a clear writer. call the first indirect image the `lensed ring’ and the remaining indirect images, currently unobservable at EHT, the `photon ring’, while EHT refers to all the indirect images as the `photon ring’. The content is provided for information purposes only. A black hole has a powerful gravitational field which traps everything that goes near it. All I can say with confidence right now is that these are important questions that experts currently are debating, and consensus on the answer may not be achieved for quite a while. You said “location is distorted” like sea waves? But the problem was, EHT had released the image for free distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Finally, why would the BH extreme gravity allow you to receive direct image as you pointed? How Strong Is Gravity at the Space Station? For light to make orbits of the black hole, it must travel near the grey-dashed circle that indicates the location of a “photon-sphere.” (A rotating black hole has no such sphere, but when seen from the north or south pole, the light observed takes similar paths to what is shown in this figure.) Good questions, deserving of comment within the post. A black hole has a powerful gravitational field which traps everything that goes near it. Then, can we admit that the described image of the ring is real or not? (This is true of EHT’s `photo’.) But what does this really mean? So far, aside from this one error [which I have already corrected above, and was more a poor choice of terminology than a physics issue], Professor Luminet only seems to be complaining that I didn’t get the history correct. "Beyond this horizon, matter and light flow freely, but as soon as the horizon's intangible boundary is crossed, matter and light become trapped," he says. I do not ask if is it blurred, but ask about dimensions and proportions, an fact that would determine their mass and rotation speed, data very important in calculations, because in the EHT photo you see many disproportions and swellings in the ring, where you say that is a nonuniform ring. and Terms of Use. Bouman’s public recognition — much of it applauding an example of a woman at the forefront of a major scientific effort — drew attention from misogynist communities on the internet. Please tell me if I’m wrong. How Particles and Fields Interact (an introduction), 2. If we conclude that EHT is seeing a mix of the accretion disk with the photon ring, with the former dominating the brightness, then this makes EHT’s measurement of the M87bh’s mass more confusing and even potentially suspect. (Rather than, or in addition to, the accretion disk, it is also possible that the dominant emission in the photo comes from the inner portion of one of the jets that emerges from the vicinity of the black hole; see Figure 8 above. Then, in a perfect camera, you’d see something like the famous picture of Gargantua, the black hole from the movie Interstellar — a direct image of the front edge of the disk, and a strongly lensed indirect image of the back side of the disk, appearing both above and below the black hole, as illustrated in Figure 11. (1/7) So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library (https://t.co/n7djw1r9hY) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. The circlet of radio waves that appears in the EHT `photo’ is probably not simply a blurred image of M87bh’s photon ring; it probably shows a combination of the photon ring with something brighter (as explained below). [Note added: this figure has been modified; in the original version I referred to the top and bottom views of the disk’s far side as the “1st indirect image”, but as pointed out by Professor Jean-Pierre Luminet, that’s not correct terminology here.]. But blurring in the camera combines the disk and photon ring into a thick ring whose brightness is dominated by the disk rather than the ring, and which can therefore be of different size even though the mass is the same. The LIGO-Virgo detections of black hole mergers—five so far—are evidence of a large population of black holes in the 10 solar-mass range. I believe professor should make corrections in his article as Professor Luminet suggests : for instance his description of the image from Interstellar is wrong. The equator is the circle that lies halfway between the poles. /The singularity inside an non-rotating black hole is really not a point in space; it is a moment in time!/ I would imagine that if they were not perfectly aligned you’d have both increased assymetry in the image, and have the middle of the image much farther away from the center of the system. Furthermore, since the `photo’ may not show us the photon ring, it’s far from clear that the dark patch in the center is the full shadow anyway. The material that initially forms the black hole may be rotating — for example, essentially all stars rotate, and so a star that collapses to form a black hole will continue to rotate. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it.