My friend's husband works in Spain and is a scientist who studies black holes - I asked her what he thought. He said it's an amazing piece of scientific ingenuity but the picture is still a fuzzy blob. He pointed me to this youtube clip.

He said that the whole point of a black hole is that nothing can escape from it so you are taking a picture of nothing!

Well, that mystery is solved.

paulears, post: 460719, member: 47782 wrote: He said that the whole point of a black hole is that nothing can escape from it so you are taking a picture of nothing!

Light cant exist within a black hole, but they do emit a form of radation called "hawking radiation" named after Steven Hawking, who lost the argument that black holes dont emit anything, and information within a black hole is lost. Those proved not to be true statements. Leonard Susskind, Godfather of string thoery, was one of the primary opposers to hawkings initial theory.

So its more like a photo of non visible, rather than nothing. Very cool either way.

A black hole may emit nothing but Hawking radiation, but the accretion disk around it can emit a lot of energy. When matter is torn apart on the way in, one portion accelerates inward and one portion retains enough momentum to escape. This happens outside the event horizon.

bouldersound, post: 460724, member: 38959 wrote: A black hole may emit nothing but Hawking radiation, but the accretion disk around it can emit a lot of energy. When matter is torn apart on the way in, one portion accelerates inward and one portion retains enough momentum to escape. This happens outside the event horizon.

Right. This is why they are thought of as points of no return. The horizon being the threshold.

Some questions is can we ever re-code the emitted information, or does the black hole eventually form into another big bang or galaxy, and does that information form something identical or similar to what it was. It could be a physical evidence to the many worlds theory, or parelell universes, since information is thought of as very scrambled, but not lost.

It could suggest a method of time travel, or even the 2nd law of thermodynamics where entropy always increase. It could imply a reforming universe.

At least i know where my 15 years worth of dissapearing guitars picks ended up.

It is fascinating research. Virtual all of it way over my head, but a lot of the images we see of deep space (from Hubble, Chandra, etc.) are not of visible light. They are representations of light in the human visible spectrum plus layers of infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and other forms of radiation that cannot be seen with the naked eye or in conventional images.

Looks like a maple donut out of focus !! ;)