First ever image of a black hole!

I think this is incredible. I always remember talking to my science teacher in the 1970's about black holes and he kept remi ding me that they were just a theory and we didn't know if they actually existed. Now we have detected them everywhere, have evidence of one at the heart of our (and all) galaxies and have a picture of one. We have come such a long way so quickly.
 
The details are mind blowing:

It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster". The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.
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"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said. "It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."
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(Source).

I can't even comprehend the size of this thing.

:eek:
 
The equipment they're using and the precision they have to achieve is almost as mind blowing as the results. I wonder if all those hard drives are supplied by commerical companies like Western Digital or Seagate, or some other company that specialises in supplying even higher quality and super reliable drives to scientists.
 
pah, black holes are passe,

the real mind bogglers are neutron stars, they are so dense that a normal-sized matchbox
containing neutron-star material would have a weight of approximately 3 billion metric tons.
 
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