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Comment by _void | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?

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Yes, we're using a telescope the size of the Earth to look at an object the size of our solar system in a galaxy about 55 million light years away. It's an infinitesimally small patch of sky.

On the other hand, the jet from the M87 black hole is quite large and we have good images of it. It's even resolvable by amateurs, I hope to take a picture of it over Easter with a small telescope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Jet

> 55 million light years

didn't he correct himself and said kilometers

55 million light years is about correct. Wikipedia still has 53.5 ± 1.63 Mly from older observations, but appendix I in paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab1141 has a bit more on the distance measurements they used. They arrive at 16.76 ± 0.75 Mpc, which translates into 54.7 ± 2.4 Mly.

He corrected himself to say 500 billion billion kilometers after mistakingly saying light years.

I haven't done the math, but I believe that roughly equates to 55 million light years.

Yup, My bad.

It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.

The significance of the image is not in its quality, but in its mere existence.

It's enough to confirm various predictions, and should give a new baseline for truth about black holes.

Consider yourself lucky that a black hole isn't Jupiter level distance from us.

At a jupiter level distance we'd be well within the event horizon. At that distance I expect to see four dimensional book cases and my daughter.

Jupiter level quality would mean that we are so close that we would be instantly torn apart.

Jupiter level quality is what I want. Not jupiter level distance.

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