Monthly Archives: April 2019

Skull & Crossbones

 in Blog  tagged NGC2467 / Puppis / Skull & Crossbones

NGC2467 is an emission nebula in the constellation Puppis, and about 17,000 light-years from Earth.  It is often referred to as the “Skull & Crossbones Nebula”, and I think you can easily see skull shape, but the cross bones are not obvious to me.  The red extends to the upper left in something like a broad line, and the lower left is certainly extended, but is really just a blob.  With a lot of imagination I guess you could see these features extending to the upper right and lower right to form an X. This is from the remote observatory […]

And Here It Is…

 in Blog  tagged black hole / EHT / event horizon / first photo / M87 / Sag A*

This is the first ever photograph of a black hole.  Not what you expected?  Well, to a VERY small degree, that’s because I lied to you in my last post when I said that it would be the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sag A*.  This is actually the center of M87, a supermassive galaxy in the constellation Virgo.  Although it is about 53 million light-years away, it is apparently large enough that it made a better target than Sag A*.  But the EHT team reports that an image of Sag A* is coming soon. […]

First Photo of a Black Hole (sort of)

 in Blog  tagged black hole / EHT / event horizon / radio astronomy / radio telescope / VLBI

I’ve been asked many times whether I have ever photographed a black hole, and my answer has always been that it’s not possible to photograph a black hole.  That’s technically correct, since no light (or other electromagnetic energy) can escape a black hole.  However, it is theoretically possible to capture an image of the “event horizon” around a black hole, and very soon we will all be able to witness the results of that theory put into practice. The above image is a computer simulation of such an event horizon, generated back in 1978 by a fellow with the ironic […]