

Hubble directly observes the disc around a black hole - jaxonrice
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-hubble-disc-black-hole.html

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gjm11
Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:
<http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/> (press release),
<http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/> (video),
[http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien...](http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1116.pdf)
(paper).

PhysOrg: just say no.

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jaxonrice
Noted for the next time I submit a space related article. Thanks for the heads
up.

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JonnieCache
The way they're using the gravitational lensing here blows my mind. From what
I understand they're using a distant galaxy as a part of the telescope itself
to resolve objects behind it. Insane.

Surely this constitues the largest scientific instrument ever?

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gnaritas
That's a pretty standard usage of gravitational lensing. It's a giant
magnifying glass in space, and they've used them as such since like forever.

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rudyfink
Wikipedia describes <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twin_QSO>
("Old Faithful") as the first identified gravitationally lensed object.

So, "since forever" is 1979, which makes me feel old.

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splat
In astrophysics, anything more than 15 years old is considered
"archeoastronomy."

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JonnieCache
Makes a change from web programming, where the equivalent period seems to be
about four months.

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r00fus
So can anyone tell me why a galaxy is considered to be anything more than a
large (and 3-dimensional) black-hole accretion disk?

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Retric
Galaxy's from huge black holes at their center they don't from around huge
black holes that predate them. Also galaxy's have several black holes of
various sizes where an accretion disks only includes smaller chunks of matter.
They can even have more than one super massive black holes if two older
galaxy's collide.

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hugh3
I was going to say "also, galactic stuff never actually falls into the central
black hole", but I'm wrong-ish. According to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_universe#Stellar_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_universe#Stellar_remnants_escape_galaxies_or_fall_into_black_holes)
it's expected that on a timescale of 10^20 years all the stars (or rather,
stellar remnants, since stars will have burned out long before) will either
fall into galactic black holes (10%) or get ejected from galaxies entirely
(90%).

So, I guess we've got that to look forward to.

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jes5199
"directly" is a little bit of an exaggeration

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inportb
Should it have been "generally relatively"?

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NHQ
Lens Flare

