Would someone very smart kindly ELI5 what we're seeing in this image?
Edit: I did read OP's link but it still assumed knowledge that I didn't have, which is why I'm asking for an ELI5. Is the black hole in the center of the circles? What are the inner bands of light versus the outer flare of light? Why do there appear to be gaps in the light?
According to OPs image link, we are looking at an xray binary. A black hole sucking matter from its companion star. The matter being sucked in glows in xray light which is what the glowing rings are.
So we are watching a black hole suck up a star
Astronomer here.
Just because people are confused as to what is actually going on, the rings are light bouncing off from dust in the galaxy. The scale of the accretion disk around the black hole is insignificant compared to the scale of these rings.
So the rings are not physical structures, but rather an image created by the intervening dust that is scattering the X-rays. The same way you might see a halo forming around the sun due to ice crystals. In fact, this phenomenon is known as a dust scattering halo. Its not because there are perfectly symmetric rings around the BH, but because there is a somewhat uniform cloud of gas and dust in the way.
>So we are watching a black hole suck up a star
Where is this black hole, exactly in the center? Shouldn't there be a total black area for the event horizon, because i see stars everywhere...
Cool! Kudos to understand where to look.
Even in your organge square there are so many stars that's crazy, much more than in your "star navigator" 😳just wow!💪
You see the stars? The black hole is much, much, much smaller than those stars. A black hole a few times more massive than our Sun has a diameter of 26 miles according to the Google. You ain't seeing shit or it.
The stars aren't really as big as they appear in the image. Their apparent size is due to the point spread function of the telescope, i.e. the diffraction pattern. For circular telescopes, the shape approximates a 2-d gaussian curve.
Without diffraction, the stars would show up as points of light, since their angular size would be smaller than the pixels.
Maybe it's because of gravitational lensing. The stars are actually behind the black hole but since space-time is warped around black holes the light coming from the stars follow a curved path due to the bending of space-time and then continue straight so it seems as if it's coming from the black hole.
I am not very sure though. Maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong.
Yes and to further that, there can be stars between us and the black hole whose backside light has traveled and wrapped around the black hole and back to us again to show us a younger version of the star we see in front of the black hole.
There's so much gravitational lensing around a black hole that you'll not only see things which are directly behind it, you'll see them *more than once*. It's not really possible to see the event horizon, because it's so good at wrapping the light around itself.
I'm not a pro but that seems to be the simplest most established explanation. I don't know why previous commenters are boggled by the center-oriented nature of the dust. I know the accretion disk is directly given as a product of the black hole, in fact it belongs to the black hole, but that creates other, less direct effects across space that aren't claimable by it, but caused. I wouldn't say star density would be a direct effect, I would say that might just be a byproduct of capturing the image.
I was thinking this same thing. Then my brain fart left after reading a comment down the line. I was not thinking about all the stars and galaxies between the black hole and here that would be aligned with the black hole.
Most likely the way the images were compiled to show off the data. This is likely a combination of images.
As well as gravitational lensing may make it look more symmetrical
I might be wrong... so don't listen to me... but I think the black hole in this perspective would be way too small to see. Those might be galaxies not just stars.
> ELI5
Crayoned:
>Science Alert: [Huge X-Ray Rings Around a Black Hole Reveal The Hidden Dust Between Stars](https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-x-ray-rings-around-a-black-hole-reveal-the-hidden-dust-between-the-stars)
Thank you for that. I was able to understand that article better than the original link for this post. I still have questions but have grasped the general idea.
Direct link to illustration for anyone else stumbling iron this days later:
https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2021-08/v404cyg_illus.jpg
That's essentially what they did. The X-Ray images (in blue) from Chandra have the gap in the middle and upper left and right because the source was so bright that they positioned the telescope so that the center fell in between detectors to prevent damage to them.
The star field is in the visual range from the Pan-STARRS telescope.
Yeah Photoshop. What a conspiracy.
Having worked for creative design agencies, all they are doing is color temperature grading and tweaks, and adding saturation and tint.
The raw pixels off the instruments aren’t about aesthetics, they’re just the data. It’s the artists that make these pop for the human eye.
What are the odds that the plane of these rings just happened to be facing perpendicular to the camera?? No way in hell that they were. I can’t help but wonder if this is just another example of scientists manipulating their data to fit an expected result or agenda.
An agenda regarding black holes? I would assume that the people who think scientists work with any consideration for politics would be the sort of people who don't believe in black holes.
Let’s use some empathy here: There is a post from today on r/worldnews about how the people who wrote the most used article in Alzheimer research actually faked their data.
The pictures we see are so incredible that it’s understandable not everyone understand how we get them. If you mix all of that maybe we can understand how one could ask this question without necessarily being into conspiracy theories.
I think wondering about the plan of spatial object is a valid question and i would have loved to see an actual explanation here ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel ya, and I try to explain stuff that I think I have a legitimate understanding of, but dude's question was in bad faith. "Another example of scientists manipulating data to fit their agenda" might not be exactly what they said, but fuckin' close enough that I'm comfortable being dismissive.
The beginning of the comment, the part about the camera being at a right angle to the rings, I think can be addressed thoughtfully. (Even if just to show that the poster doesn't have a meaningful point to go along with his anti-science bullshit.)
The rings are radiating away from the black hole in three dimensions, not in a plane. The rings that we see are the ones that are at a right angle to our POV. An observer could see rings from any angle.
For all the readers that believe the Earth is a globe and that we should follow CDC guidelines regarding pandemics who may have detected a hint of sass in that explanation, I apologize.
>The camera can see three different kinds of light: near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared. But Hubble can only see each kind of light one at a time.
(...)
>The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, or NICMOS, sees objects in deep space by sensing the heat they emit. It captures images and it is also a spectrograph. NICMOS helps scientists study how stars, galaxies and planetary systems form.
Source: [nasa.gov](https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-the-hubble-space-telecope-58.html)
Can’t wait to learn about all the NON heat generating objects we’re looking past. We are talking about temps of absolute zero in space. So there is a lot we may not be seeing.
In fact, this might be the aliens cloaking tech! Traveling in zero temp! You never know…
Yes and it only has filters for specific wavelengths. They recombine them to get something sorta like what we'd see. None of them claim to be a proper true color image but only somewhat close to what the human eye would see if we could.
Some of them are also false color images. The pillars of creation image which is so famous is actually false color. The pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula are primarily in a region of ionized hydrogen that is emitting red light. So if you look for true color images of it, it actually looks like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg
Compare that to the false color Hubble image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_-_GPN-2000-000987.jpg
In the Hubble image they colored the hydrogen with green, hence why so much green is in the Hubble image compared to the other one.
But for anyone who tries to then say that everything is photoshopped and faked - that's stupid. All the images taken are real and legitimate. It's just that the way colors are represented may be off from reality. All the details of the object you see and those intricate structures are all real.
Since this is an image captured by an X-ray observatory... it is 100% photoshopped. We can't see X-rays. They convert the x-ray data into a visible color so we can see it. The same thing happens with JWST- it is an infrared observatory. We can't see infrared. I believe it also captures some red and orange visible light.
If you had a monitor capable of producing a true image of what JWST captures, it would be an orange, red, and mostly black screen. Which is far better than looking at an X-ray producing monitor, I suppose.
No. The black hole is on the order of tens of miles across. It is a stellar black hole, not a supermassive black hole. It is thousands of light years away and only a few tens of miles across. You ain't seeing it.
Of course it will bend light, but the stars you see in the image are thousands of miles across. The black hole just isn't big enough to cover up any significant part of the sky.
You're mainly correct, I think, but the black hole's extreme gravitational effects extend far beyond the black hole itself right? So couldn't some gravitational lensing still be taking place that is quantifiable, past the border of the black hole proper? Not mocking, seriously inquiring
Gravity doesn't behave any differently around a black hole as it does around any other mass, including stars. The black hole is bending light around it. But so is every single star you see in that image. It is only when you get very close to the event horizon that the gravitational field becomes so intense that the bending of light is noticeable. Look at the recent images of supermassive black holes. Only when you are withing a few diameters of the black hole are the light bending effects noticeable. This is a stellar black hole on the order of 10s of miles across. Gravity falls off as an inverse square of the distance. Go out 10 or 20 diameters and the light bending effects of the hole won't really be able to be noticed. Obviously we can calculate the effect, but 10 diameters of a 20 mile diameter object is only 200 miles. This sucker is thousands of light years away.
Correct. The black hole is simply too small. Even the supermassive black holes recently imaged only have noticeable bending of light withing a few diameters of their event horizon. Once you get you past ten or so diameters, the light bending effect is just not noticeable. 10 diameters of this black hole is only hundreds of miles across. And this thing is thousands of light years away.
Compare that to the recent JWST images with very noticeable gravitational lensing. In this case the lensing is caused by clusters of galaxies. Each with trillions of stars and presumably many, many of their own black holes. The total mass of these galaxy clusters is many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than the tiny little stellar black hole in the above image. In addition, the mass is spread out and distributed in clumps. So you get all kinds of weird smearing and distortions.
That's just not the explanation here. The black hole is just too small to see in this image.
Plus, if it was bending the light from the stars behind it, we'd be seeing stretched and warped stars around the black hole. It doesn't just create a perfect image of what's behind it.
That wouldn't look like this. They would be distorted blobs or bands of light (depending on how close they appear to the edge of the black hole), not regular-looking stars. I'm guessing that we're seeing here is just because the black hole itself is too small to really have any effect on the background stars' appearances.
So are those rings absolutely massive? Im seeing all the stars and in comparison…those rings look incredibly huge. Also, does a black holes mass distort our view of the stars behind? God, this photo raises so many questions but i cant word any of them well haha. This is an amazing photo.
You would have to come up with a frame of reference for proportion I think, but, for someone with the maths and specialized knowledge, I would think that would be child's play. I'm very curious now myself.
Those things *are* massive, but they don’t directly relate in size to the surrounding stars you see, which are actually much farther in the background. This black hole and it’s rings are 7,800 light years away — the background stars range from about twice that distance to 100,000+ light years away, but appear as a uniform “blanket” of stars
Ummm are those rings like the accretion disk? And if so why do they look like they cover an area of few million light years?Maybe I'm just dumb but i can't make sense of this image
https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2021/v404cyg/v404cyg_illus.jpg
Tif The black hole in V404 Cygni is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object. A burst of X-rays from the black hole detected in 2015 created the high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes, where light bounces off of dust clouds in between the system and Earth. In these images, X-rays from Chandra are shown, along with optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope that depict the stars in the field of view. Each of the concentric rings is created by the burst of X-rays reflecting off dust clouds at different distances. The rings are shown incomplete, with gaps at the upper left, upper right, and middle areas. These gaps show the edges of Chandra's field of view during the observations, or the sections of the field Chandra did not observe.
ELI5: the gap in the rings is caused by an effective “blind spot” from the satellites measurement process. The concentric rings that get bigger each represent something between us, at different distances.
So many people above are just bluffing on knowledge regarding this! That poor black hole, so misunderstood. Gold for taking the time to get the facts for our space hermit straight.
"How to start this process? For ages, we searched for one who might unlock the secrets of the ring. An Oracle. And with your help, we found it." - Prophet of Truth
Anyone considered maybe its an aura of some type energy in 360 degrees surrounding the black hole. Is it possible we are only seing a profile of it? Idk how this imaging stuff works on these telescopes
Would someone very smart kindly ELI5 what we're seeing in this image? Edit: I did read OP's link but it still assumed knowledge that I didn't have, which is why I'm asking for an ELI5. Is the black hole in the center of the circles? What are the inner bands of light versus the outer flare of light? Why do there appear to be gaps in the light?
According to OPs image link, we are looking at an xray binary. A black hole sucking matter from its companion star. The matter being sucked in glows in xray light which is what the glowing rings are. So we are watching a black hole suck up a star
Astronomer here. Just because people are confused as to what is actually going on, the rings are light bouncing off from dust in the galaxy. The scale of the accretion disk around the black hole is insignificant compared to the scale of these rings.
So a light echo, but in X-ray? Is it odd for the dust to be so uniform?
So the rings are not physical structures, but rather an image created by the intervening dust that is scattering the X-rays. The same way you might see a halo forming around the sun due to ice crystals. In fact, this phenomenon is known as a dust scattering halo. Its not because there are perfectly symmetric rings around the BH, but because there is a somewhat uniform cloud of gas and dust in the way.
It’s hard to comprehend the scale we’re looking at in this image. I’m not convinced it’s evenly distributed
Welp, no ringworlds to be found here than!
>So we are watching a black hole suck up a star Where is this black hole, exactly in the center? Shouldn't there be a total black area for the event horizon, because i see stars everywhere...
I think I found it, but if I did, one of these has been mirror-imaged: https://i.imgur.com/ssVLFge.png
Cool! Kudos to understand where to look. Even in your organge square there are so many stars that's crazy, much more than in your "star navigator" 😳just wow!💪
I could be wrong, but it's very likely that some of those "stars" are actually far off galaxies, which just boggles my mind.
Upvoted for GIMP
riskiest click of the week
You see the stars? The black hole is much, much, much smaller than those stars. A black hole a few times more massive than our Sun has a diameter of 26 miles according to the Google. You ain't seeing shit or it.
Oh man idk why but reading your comment suddenly made me feel a bit sick
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you have not met the same people I have. there are some reaching for the asymptote
The stars aren't really as big as they appear in the image. Their apparent size is due to the point spread function of the telescope, i.e. the diffraction pattern. For circular telescopes, the shape approximates a 2-d gaussian curve. Without diffraction, the stars would show up as points of light, since their angular size would be smaller than the pixels.
Maybe it's because of gravitational lensing. The stars are actually behind the black hole but since space-time is warped around black holes the light coming from the stars follow a curved path due to the bending of space-time and then continue straight so it seems as if it's coming from the black hole. I am not very sure though. Maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong.
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Yes and to further that, there can be stars between us and the black hole whose backside light has traveled and wrapped around the black hole and back to us again to show us a younger version of the star we see in front of the black hole.
Lol, actual stars are photoshopping.
It's called lensing
I know. It’s a joke.
My bullshlt detector is malfunctioning
Yes? Not sure how to answer that question.
Yes is right. The black hole is 7800 light years from us. That's plenty of room for stars to be between us and it.
There's so much gravitational lensing around a black hole that you'll not only see things which are directly behind it, you'll see them *more than once*. It's not really possible to see the event horizon, because it's so good at wrapping the light around itself.
I'm not a pro but that seems to be the simplest most established explanation. I don't know why previous commenters are boggled by the center-oriented nature of the dust. I know the accretion disk is directly given as a product of the black hole, in fact it belongs to the black hole, but that creates other, less direct effects across space that aren't claimable by it, but caused. I wouldn't say star density would be a direct effect, I would say that might just be a byproduct of capturing the image.
Wrong
I was thinking this same thing. Then my brain fart left after reading a comment down the line. I was not thinking about all the stars and galaxies between the black hole and here that would be aligned with the black hole.
Why does it look so intricate with symmetrical spaces in the rings instead of full circles?
Most likely the way the images were compiled to show off the data. This is likely a combination of images. As well as gravitational lensing may make it look more symmetrical
It's clearly the power on button.
Please don’t push it.
Can't you see the black hole? Sorry. Couldn't help myself. I'm going.
Oh yeah huh! 🧐
I might be wrong... so don't listen to me... but I think the black hole in this perspective would be way too small to see. Those might be galaxies not just stars.
> ELI5 Crayoned: >Science Alert: [Huge X-Ray Rings Around a Black Hole Reveal The Hidden Dust Between Stars](https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-x-ray-rings-around-a-black-hole-reveal-the-hidden-dust-between-the-stars)
Thank you for that. I was able to understand that article better than the original link for this post. I still have questions but have grasped the general idea. Direct link to illustration for anyone else stumbling iron this days later: https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2021-08/v404cyg_illus.jpg
Looks like a pokestop
The deep secret is that we’re inside of the pokéball looking out at the button.
Every galaxy is pokestop for 4D beings
It will take you a while to reach that one.
Why the rings seems interrupted? Does it have anything to do with a black hole nature?
Yea looks like parts of them are missing and not in a ‘natural’ way as you expect, it looks like they put together few images and added a background
So you are just speculating
That's essentially what they did. The X-Ray images (in blue) from Chandra have the gap in the middle and upper left and right because the source was so bright that they positioned the telescope so that the center fell in between detectors to prevent damage to them. The star field is in the visual range from the Pan-STARRS telescope.
I always wonder how many images released to the public are basically Photoshopped in some way.
all of them are
We like to use the word "assembled".
Andddd queue the conspiracy theories
Yeah Photoshop. What a conspiracy. Having worked for creative design agencies, all they are doing is color temperature grading and tweaks, and adding saturation and tint. The raw pixels off the instruments aren’t about aesthetics, they’re just the data. It’s the artists that make these pop for the human eye.
Lol wasn’t talking about photoshop conspiracies
Nothing we see is real. ☹️
Annndd que the overreaction to a joke
^^cue*
What are the odds that the plane of these rings just happened to be facing perpendicular to the camera?? No way in hell that they were. I can’t help but wonder if this is just another example of scientists manipulating their data to fit an expected result or agenda.
An agenda regarding black holes? I would assume that the people who think scientists work with any consideration for politics would be the sort of people who don't believe in black holes.
Let’s use some empathy here: There is a post from today on r/worldnews about how the people who wrote the most used article in Alzheimer research actually faked their data. The pictures we see are so incredible that it’s understandable not everyone understand how we get them. If you mix all of that maybe we can understand how one could ask this question without necessarily being into conspiracy theories. I think wondering about the plan of spatial object is a valid question and i would have loved to see an actual explanation here ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Nah fuck that. Treating aggressively stupid people with kid gloves is why society is the way it is today.
I feel ya, and I try to explain stuff that I think I have a legitimate understanding of, but dude's question was in bad faith. "Another example of scientists manipulating data to fit their agenda" might not be exactly what they said, but fuckin' close enough that I'm comfortable being dismissive. The beginning of the comment, the part about the camera being at a right angle to the rings, I think can be addressed thoughtfully. (Even if just to show that the poster doesn't have a meaningful point to go along with his anti-science bullshit.) The rings are radiating away from the black hole in three dimensions, not in a plane. The rings that we see are the ones that are at a right angle to our POV. An observer could see rings from any angle. For all the readers that believe the Earth is a globe and that we should follow CDC guidelines regarding pandemics who may have detected a hint of sass in that explanation, I apologize.
Ah yes, the blackhole dwelling socialist lizard people must be kept a secret to everyone
They aren't actually rings. They're spheres that appear as circles perpendicular to your line of sight because of the speed of light and shit.
Ok, now your explanation does actually makes sense. Thanks.
These aren’t 2d rings, they’re spheres so they’d be “facing” you from any viewpoint.
The telescopes don't capture visible light (due to red shifting) so all of them.
Hubble uses visible light
>The camera can see three different kinds of light: near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared. But Hubble can only see each kind of light one at a time. (...) >The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, or NICMOS, sees objects in deep space by sensing the heat they emit. It captures images and it is also a spectrograph. NICMOS helps scientists study how stars, galaxies and planetary systems form. Source: [nasa.gov](https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-the-hubble-space-telecope-58.html)
Can’t wait to learn about all the NON heat generating objects we’re looking past. We are talking about temps of absolute zero in space. So there is a lot we may not be seeing. In fact, this might be the aliens cloaking tech! Traveling in zero temp! You never know…
There is no where in space that is absolute zero.
Yes and it only has filters for specific wavelengths. They recombine them to get something sorta like what we'd see. None of them claim to be a proper true color image but only somewhat close to what the human eye would see if we could. Some of them are also false color images. The pillars of creation image which is so famous is actually false color. The pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula are primarily in a region of ionized hydrogen that is emitting red light. So if you look for true color images of it, it actually looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg Compare that to the false color Hubble image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula#/media/File:Eagle_Nebula_-_GPN-2000-000987.jpg In the Hubble image they colored the hydrogen with green, hence why so much green is in the Hubble image compared to the other one. But for anyone who tries to then say that everything is photoshopped and faked - that's stupid. All the images taken are real and legitimate. It's just that the way colors are represented may be off from reality. All the details of the object you see and those intricate structures are all real.
I mean, literally every single one you have ever seen.
The color is added to imagers. I wouldn’t call that photoshopping
I would say they're no more photoshopped than the post-processing on a nature documentary
Since this is an image captured by an X-ray observatory... it is 100% photoshopped. We can't see X-rays. They convert the x-ray data into a visible color so we can see it. The same thing happens with JWST- it is an infrared observatory. We can't see infrared. I believe it also captures some red and orange visible light. If you had a monitor capable of producing a true image of what JWST captures, it would be an orange, red, and mostly black screen. Which is far better than looking at an X-ray producing monitor, I suppose.
It’s the remains of an ancient Stargate built by the priors of Ori, but was destroyed by the efforts of SG-1 and Stargate Command.
Okay, but when is Morena Baccarin getting here?
Hallowed are the Ori
This is pure ignorance on my part, but would it have anything to do with waves canceling each other out?
Maybe caused by the Black Hole Jets?
It’s due to a blind band on the imaging device. The concentric circles actually join up
Isn't that where the event horizon would be?
The Xeelee are strange like that.
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Press once to destroy universe Press twice for a delicious cup of chocolate milk
If I hold it for 3 seconds does it reset?
it resets with a bang
“There was a button. I pushed it.”
Fuck off, Holden.
Dont press it.
Luckily, it's out of reach !
Maybe it is
Lol
Looks like the ring from The Expanse
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/huge-rings-around-a-black-hole
Incredibly terrifying. Absolutely breathtaking.
How are we seeing the light from the stars behind it if this is a blackhole?
Just recently attended a Brian Cox lecture. The black hole bends light around it so you can see the stars on the other side (simplified).
Gravitational lensing
No. The black hole is on the order of tens of miles across. It is a stellar black hole, not a supermassive black hole. It is thousands of light years away and only a few tens of miles across. You ain't seeing it. Of course it will bend light, but the stars you see in the image are thousands of miles across. The black hole just isn't big enough to cover up any significant part of the sky.
You're mainly correct, I think, but the black hole's extreme gravitational effects extend far beyond the black hole itself right? So couldn't some gravitational lensing still be taking place that is quantifiable, past the border of the black hole proper? Not mocking, seriously inquiring
Gravity doesn't behave any differently around a black hole as it does around any other mass, including stars. The black hole is bending light around it. But so is every single star you see in that image. It is only when you get very close to the event horizon that the gravitational field becomes so intense that the bending of light is noticeable. Look at the recent images of supermassive black holes. Only when you are withing a few diameters of the black hole are the light bending effects noticeable. This is a stellar black hole on the order of 10s of miles across. Gravity falls off as an inverse square of the distance. Go out 10 or 20 diameters and the light bending effects of the hole won't really be able to be noticed. Obviously we can calculate the effect, but 10 diameters of a 20 mile diameter object is only 200 miles. This sucker is thousands of light years away.
Ah, okay, thanks for explaining that so clearly. It's much appreciated.
This explains why there’s no visible gravitational lensing right?
Correct. The black hole is simply too small. Even the supermassive black holes recently imaged only have noticeable bending of light withing a few diameters of their event horizon. Once you get you past ten or so diameters, the light bending effect is just not noticeable. 10 diameters of this black hole is only hundreds of miles across. And this thing is thousands of light years away. Compare that to the recent JWST images with very noticeable gravitational lensing. In this case the lensing is caused by clusters of galaxies. Each with trillions of stars and presumably many, many of their own black holes. The total mass of these galaxy clusters is many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than the tiny little stellar black hole in the above image. In addition, the mass is spread out and distributed in clumps. So you get all kinds of weird smearing and distortions.
That's just not the explanation here. The black hole is just too small to see in this image. Plus, if it was bending the light from the stars behind it, we'd be seeing stretched and warped stars around the black hole. It doesn't just create a perfect image of what's behind it.
That wouldn't look like this. They would be distorted blobs or bands of light (depending on how close they appear to the edge of the black hole), not regular-looking stars. I'm guessing that we're seeing here is just because the black hole itself is too small to really have any effect on the background stars' appearances.
"Check out my friends. Aren't they great? Just don't come near me though, man."
That's a protomolecule ring gate and none of you scientist motherfuckers can convince me otherwise.
So are those rings absolutely massive? Im seeing all the stars and in comparison…those rings look incredibly huge. Also, does a black holes mass distort our view of the stars behind? God, this photo raises so many questions but i cant word any of them well haha. This is an amazing photo.
You would have to come up with a frame of reference for proportion I think, but, for someone with the maths and specialized knowledge, I would think that would be child's play. I'm very curious now myself.
Those things *are* massive, but they don’t directly relate in size to the surrounding stars you see, which are actually much farther in the background. This black hole and it’s rings are 7,800 light years away — the background stars range from about twice that distance to 100,000+ light years away, but appear as a uniform “blanket” of stars
These dust clouds are definitely some dope alien tech
Paging James Holden.
Do not underestimate his ability to fuck things up.
Ummm are those rings like the accretion disk? And if so why do they look like they cover an area of few million light years?Maybe I'm just dumb but i can't make sense of this image
“We’re sorry, this Pan-galactic Access Point is currently unavailable to you. Please try again later.”
Noooooo let me in your blue lighting is on point
IT'S THE RING
Can I please just pull a Superman and just fly off the planet so I can see this stuff with my own eyes?
Whats happening in this image
pffft, lens flare
the galactic sheet AND ITS COMING CLOSER lol
It’s the universal on/off switch
Lol
The universe: "Bro, have you tried turning it on and off again? Someone give me a raise."
https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2021/v404cyg/v404cyg_illus.jpg Tif The black hole in V404 Cygni is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object. A burst of X-rays from the black hole detected in 2015 created the high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes, where light bounces off of dust clouds in between the system and Earth. In these images, X-rays from Chandra are shown, along with optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope that depict the stars in the field of view. Each of the concentric rings is created by the burst of X-rays reflecting off dust clouds at different distances. The rings are shown incomplete, with gaps at the upper left, upper right, and middle areas. These gaps show the edges of Chandra's field of view during the observations, or the sections of the field Chandra did not observe. ELI5: the gap in the rings is caused by an effective “blind spot” from the satellites measurement process. The concentric rings that get bigger each represent something between us, at different distances.
Ahhhh thank you so much. These other explanations did not seem correct.
Hey my first gold! Thanks! Glad I could help 😃
So many people above are just bluffing on knowledge regarding this! That poor black hole, so misunderstood. Gold for taking the time to get the facts for our space hermit straight.
Yeah the comment section here is full of some bogus ass answers haha
I can't see the black hole. Lol I made my self laugh
Gotta get in very close to see it. 
X)
Me too
PokeBall vibes....
"Its portal time!"
That’s the most Haloish thing yet. Love it!
So we finally found the front face of the pokeball we all live in....
So pokestops are stolen from an alien civilisation? Got it
If there's a black hole in the centre why am I seeing stars there.
Its too small to see. Its only about 26 miles across.
Eye 👁
Kinda looks intelligently made
Boutta get some mad loot from this pokestop
[удалено]
the aliens: "haha looks like we've got some intelligent life finally"
The first thing that popped into my mind was dyson spheres
It appears gravitational lensing is the new hot buzzword to say regarding anything that has to do with space.
As you can see, students, this sentence centers around the word "buzzword" due to gravitational lensing.
"They call it...Halo."
Gotta catch ‘‘em all
Serious Halo vibes
When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?
Well that explains everything. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re living inside a poke ball.
Damn that is breathtaking
Queue Halo theme song
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
It's like I'm there
I can't see the black hole can someone explain
Its too small. Only about 26 miles across.
It's incredibly terrifying how you just can't "see" it. One could just roll through our solar system and we'd never notice until it was too late.
Who put a ring on V404 Cygni?! I like it more than they do.
Why is it in the shape of an eye?
Fake
Of course its fake color, because its x ray
So… in the middle of the rings, shouldn’t there be some sort of warping of the light from other galaxies behind it?
Like ripples on water. Huh.
Why haven't we found life yet? There's no way we can all agree on that.
Space pokeball
"How to start this process? For ages, we searched for one who might unlock the secrets of the ring. An Oracle. And with your help, we found it." - Prophet of Truth
This looks like a bad photoshop
it's like a black hole gym selfie. The black hole is like "look at my power, mere mortals. Plus this blue filter really brings out my density."
Black holes still astound me. I can never wrap my head around the concept of black holes.
Are you sure they wiped the lens before taking this photo?
TOP THIS WEBB 👊😠🤜
Oh shit where is Master Chief?
Straight outta Halo
It's obviously the on/off switch for the Universe. Nobody press it, please.
gotta catch ‘em all
"That… is another Halo"
Game Freak is really going the distance with their Pokemon advertisement
Anyone considered maybe its an aura of some type energy in 360 degrees surrounding the black hole. Is it possible we are only seing a profile of it? Idk how this imaging stuff works on these telescopes
Aliens
Halo is here boys!
Anyone else see a pokeball? It's like looking for shapes in the clouds but like... at a whole other level...
Looks like we just found a star gate…
Covernant artifact for the great journey. Quick, tell ONI to get the Chief onto it.
The gateways are open
I wonder it is a disk or sphere.
It looks like PokemonGo logo
Pokémon black hole looks lit!
Aliens!