Black Hole .. seeing is believing

[arthurking83]

The EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) was scheduled to release images of a black hole on Wed 10th April, and they didn't disappoint.

EHT website

Earthrise is possibly one of the most significant images ever shot in the history of humankind ... it showed us how small we areas a community/civilisation.

'Black Hole' must surely come close to a similar level of significance.
Seeing the unseeable for the first time, confirmation of their existence, confirmation on the theories of how they're expected to behave .. etc.

FWIW: the actual black hole itself is supposedly larger than the solar system!

[ameerat42]

Phew!
Some salient points from that article...

A bit more powerful than my lappy

Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

The scale of things...
If the event horizon of the black hole is 2.5 time smaller than its shadow, then that makes it about 16 billion km wide...

[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot
escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and
measures just under 40 billion km across.

---From which the event horizon is as wide as half again of the diameter of outermost part of the orbit of Pluto!!
Ie, significantly bigger than the major part of the solar system

A link to the hi-res jpeg image.

- - - Updated - - -

Correction!!! - It's the even horizon that's 40 billion Km across. - OK, forget our solar system
Make that 1/1000th the distance to Alpha Centauri instead