Picture of Black Hole Revealed

Today 11 April 2019 I was thrilled to see the first picture of a black hole on the internet, on TV news reports and in newspapers proving Einstein’s prediction and filling in a huge physical gap in space physics and cosmology. The theory had told us black holes might exist but we couldn’t see them so we weren’t certain. And with our recent push to evidence-based ideas, and policies and practices, scepticism was justified.

Up to now there were gaps in all the space theories telling us to believe what we couldn’t see: black holes were the biggest most powerful concentrations of interchangeable energy and mass in our universe and were the creator and driver of our universe’s expansion,  and many explosions and engulfments of stars and the cause of many catastrophic stellar events and time-space changes happening around us, but we couldn’t see them. Were black holes merely theoretical gap-filling? Well no and now we can prove they exist.
Now we can see a picture of a black hole, the big elephant in the room is actually now visible and can be addressed! They do exist. This one in the picture is in the constellation Virgo and is bigger than our whole solar system.

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun.

On this website icansaythat.com I wrote on 3 December 2018 my Blog 5 “See” an Invisible Black Hole in Space: Marvel at its Magic     on how some excited scientists had detected and outlined the circumference of a black hole and how we should now believe black holes exist. To me it was a momentous finding.  And now there’s this- the real thing, an actual real live picture that took some long and hard work from telescopes which formed a grid as big as our earth to collect data from this very very far engine in our universe and make a picture of it.

Wasn’t I clever to pick this up as a “big idea” and write about it in December 2018, four months before this big announcement today!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html?emc=edit_MBAU_p_20190410&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=63799329tion%3DtopNews&section=topNews&te=1
This NYTimes article gives the lowdown on the work it took to make the picture. If you can’t download the picture from this as I couldn’t, go to Google and search picture of black hole eg
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-04-10/black-hole-event-horizon-telescope-announcement-astrophysics/10989534

This is why we can all become excited about science. It makes our earthly worries trivial and respect for what our brains and minds can deliver miraculous!

I had another prescient moment with my blog 2. On August 21 2018 I wrote Welcoming 25 Million Australia: Immigrants have made us.  
Shortly after, on October 27 2018, The world-wide Economist magazine wrote a leader on What the world can learn from Australia: Aussie Rules (with a picture of a kangaroo on front page) praising Australia for creating a brilliantly successful nation out of its immigrants, same as I had said in my blog! economist.com/leaders/2018/10/27/what-the-world-can-learn-from-australia

I can pick big ideas! And bring them to you here on icansaythat.com!

My latest blog before this one is 7. Population Growth is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement is another worthwhile Big Idea. I’m hoping some smart journalist will pick this up and report how important is our population growth, how we’re heading for population stabilisation through natural causes and how successful we are in advancing Steven Pinker’s Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress as I outlined in Blog 1.

Please give me your comments on any of these three blogs or any others.

Zrinka 11 April 2019