Hurray for humanity. At the same time the lesser, darker sides of our natures are being expressed in superstition and fearmongering, the better STEM majors of our natures are showing us the universe in a detail never before imagined. Gentlemen… behold:
Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole
If you are a little disappointed in the resolution, bear in mind that this is the supermassive (6.5 *billion* solar mass) black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy 55 *million* light years away. The glowing ring is the accretion disk around the hole… a disk of gas and dust spinning around the holes equatorial plane, raised to incandescence from friction and tidal forces. The reason why the disk isn’t uniform around the hole? Actually, it is. But some of the disk is rotating towards us; some rotating away from us. And the rotation speed approaches the speed of light. Consequently, the light from the part of the disk rotating towards us is blue-shifted in frequency and increased in power; the light from the side of the disk rotating away from us is red shifted down in frequency and vastly reduced in apparent power.
This image was captured via radio telescope interferometry, creating a telescope with roughly the effective diameter of the Earth. The scopes ran at a wavelength of 1.3mm, into the microwaves, not visible light.
The central dark region is the “shadow” of the black hole, about 2.5 times the size of the actual event horizon, which is about 40 *billion* kilometers in diameter (something like 267 astronomical units… substantially larger than the solar system). The shadow is a region darkened by the gravity of the hole bending light away from reaching us. So just eyeballing it, if the even horizon is 40 billion km in diameter and the shadow is 2.5 times bigger, and the glowing portion of the accretion disk is 4 or maybe 5 time bigger than that… then the glowing accretion disk is something along the lines of 500 billion km in diameter.