Photo of a super-massive blackhole

Sleipnir

well, not really a photo of one as they're invisible but, a photo of the material around it being sucked in.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1442.html

jumpguy

How're they so bright if they're meant to be invisible?

Captain Chaos

jumpguy wrote: »

How're they so bright if they're meant to be invisible?

Sleipnir wrote: »

a photo of the material around it being sucked in.

.

jumpguy

Captain Chaos wrote: »

.

Oh touché my friend.

Linguo

Great pic! It's nice to see something like this to put things in perspective when you're sitting in your office in work, going about your business!:D

Linguo

jumpguy wrote: »

How're they so bright if they're meant to be invisible?

The material being sucked in is being heated and emits light I think!

DenMan

The light is being bent around the black hole. Spectacular shot. Nice find OP.

bigeasyeah

Awe-inspiring.

SuprSi

I'm very curious to know how quickly (relatively speaking) matter is being sucked into the black hole and if it will continue sucking stuff from further and further away into itself or whether it will just die once the immediate matter has disappeared?

geuro

Is 'super-massive' black hole not a contradiction in terms?

Obviously not, as the nasa site refers to the black hole's mass - but i was under the impression that a black hole packed everything together so densely that it's mass becomes negligible.

Obviously I'm no scientist (I'm a computer scientist ). Do I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of mass?

AtomicHorror

geuro wrote: »

Is 'super-massive' black hole not a contradiction in terms?

Nope. A normal black hole is the collapsed remnant of a massive star. A super massive black hole is when multiple stars (or black holes) combine to form... well a super massive black hole.

geuro wrote: »

Obviously not, as the nasa site refers to the black hole's mass - but i was under the impression that a black hole packed everything together so densely that it's mass becomes negligible.

Obviously I'm no scientist (I'm a computer scientist ). Do I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of mass?

Yep. Mass is only lost if matter is lost. The whole point of a black hole is that it retains all of that mass in a very compact space. That mass is what produces the huge gravity.

ZorbaTehZ

When you speak about the relative sizes of black holes, you're not refering to the volume of the black hole itself (the "singularity",which is zero (usually)) but the radius of the event horizon which is proportional to the mass of the black hole, i.e. the more stuff that gets sucked in will increase it's schwarzschild radius, and thus make it "larger".