3 ms·
But you can only image millimeters before it, right? It still wouldn't show what happens at the event horizon, would it? Or am I wrong? (Armchair physicist as b
by themartorana 11y ago
But you can only image millimeters before it, right? It still wouldn't show what happens at the event horizon, would it? Or am I wrong? (Armchair physicist as best, so correct me where I'm wrong, please.)
- sliken 11y agoSure, but we've not seen an acretion disk so far, only the resulting jets. But by definition we can only see up to the event horizon, not the horizon itself or beyond.
- ars 11y agoYou can't see the edge of the event horizon either - time is stopped at such a place. And slightly farther away events happen so slowly they are invisible at human time scales. Even far from a black hole it would be almost impossible see anything. All the light would be red shifted to invisibility (because of the intense gravitational field), and the brightness would be very low because it's happening so slowly. I suspect that some of the very red, very dim, galaxies that are assumed to be very distant because they are hubble-red-shifted so much, are actually super-massive objects.
- davesque 11y agoIt's probably true that you wouldn't be imaging the event horizon itself for various reasons. I just mean it would be amazing to peer into the vicinity of a suspected black hole and see, as theory would predict, a black spot along with an accretion disc.