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Photograph by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr

• davesque 9y ago
  But a black hole has literally never been imaged.
  • ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    but this could be an image of the lack of image. there are a couple ways to take what you said, since "light isn't escaping" how about the event horizon then
    • davesque 9y ago
      No. There is literally no high-res image in existence of the lack of light effected by a black hole's event horizon. Any cool-looking picture of light apparently warping around some unseen object, gas jets shooting out of a black ball, or any other depiction of any fidelity is an artist's impression at this point. Currently, there is a project underway (http://eventhorizontelescope.org/ http://eventhorizontelescope.org/) coordinating the efforts of many different researchers with the goal of resolving the event horizon of a black hole. This project would only produce an image that most people would still call extremely blurry. But it would be the first legitimate image of the characteristic visual features of a black hole.
  • stagbeetle 9y ago
    You are correct, after doing some digging I found this caption: "An illustration of the supermassive black hole located in the middle of the very dense galaxy M60-UCD1. It weighs as much as 21 million times the mass of our Sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe, G. Bacon (STScI)" leading to: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1419a/ https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1419a/