First detection of light from behind a black hole

news.stanford.edu

215 points·hhs··7 comments

The written article is very informative but the graphics will fall short for those that are visual learners, and may even confuse.

As i come to understand it from the written article, the reason light from behind the black hole can be seen, is the rapidly twisting of the magnetic field and the warping of spacetime that ocurrs. However, none of the visual representations show any magnetic field twisting or warping of spacetime.

For all the Greeks: The institute behind the discovery is named Kavli Institute.

Can you blame them, they are looking at holes all day.

I was naïvely disappointed that the light was not from beyond the event horizon, but instead some kind of gravitational lensing. It was not the "regular" gravitational lensing but something much more exotic, but still, I was disappointed it was not some kind of Star-Trek level beoynd the event horizon information peeking through. :-D

> not from beyond the event horizon

Clearly -- As this would have been impossible by the definition of Event Horizon [1] : )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Event_horizon_of...

…which is precisely why such an event would have been interesting.

Not just interesting. Mind-blowing. Earth-shaking. Jaw-dropping.

The kind of thing that should be front-page news of every newspaper and magazine. Including Cat Fancy and Woodworker Monthly.

It would be behind cold fusion and a message from aliens... but that's about it. It would be far more important than the Higgs boson or Fermat's Last Theorem.

So if that's the only thing that rises to a level that's not disappointing, one should prepare for a lot of disappointment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com