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This is the first-ever picture of a black hole. Thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope team.

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18302343/ ... nt-horizon

And of course xkcd had their take on this:

and on a more serious note:

Xkcd again...

Hard to comprehend the size of it all. Looks like a million times larger than the sun.

It's mass is about 6.5 billion times our suns mass. The accretion disk spins at 2 million miles an hour. It is far larger than a million times the size of the sun

The numbers needed to describe the thing are just gobsmacking

It's 6.5 billion times the MASS of our sun, but it's SIZE is not to the same scale. I did a bit of quick googling and found that the estimated diameter of the black hole is 23 million miles.

That's just about the diameter of Mercury's orbit. So don't assume that the black hole is bigger than the orbit of Pluto. Xkcd was just showing relative scale.

You're not seeing the actual black hole in that photo (it's more like an speck in the center if you COULD see it, but since it doesn't emit or reflect light, it's blacker than black and invisible).

The darker area in the center is just an area devoid of much matter because the hole swallowed most of it already. The outer glowing ring is the accretion disk, which is a lot of gas and dust locked in a fast orbit around the black hole and slowly being swallowed. It spins so fast that the dust and gas approaches the speed of light and the friction turns it into plasma and makes it glow. It's millions of degrees.

Yeah I didnt mean the singularity was millions of times (although the orbit of mercury is big enough) I was just referring to the accretion disk since we cannot see/detect beyond the event horizon.

No big deal. I traveled to Sag A in Elite Dangerous.

Just amazing!

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FlyingPenguin wrote:And of course xkcd had their take on this:

lol!