"The temptation is to interpret the EHT image as a straightforward telescopic view of the hot accretion disk, seen from above, with the black hole carving out a hole in the middle. But it isn’t quite that."
So that's not what I expected to see, nor what I think I saw, but then I'm probably not part of the typical public. I do realize that it's a radio image not in the visible spectrum... so maybe that's deceptive too, like thermal imaging. But it's still click bait.
The problem is that when the deception is caused by a person instead of an object it is malicious. "The picture is deceptive" is neutral, but "scientists created a deceptive image" sounds very malicious. And while the headline states the former, it's not a big leap to assume the latter.
> The groundbreaking picture of a black hole that graced most newspaper front pages on 11th April must be one of the most deceptive scientific images ever. That’s not to impute any intentional deceit to the international team of 200 or so astronomers who created it—it’s just that nature conspires here to produce something that looks archetypally, almost simplistically black-holeish, but which in reality is a mind-bendingly complex sight.
And the article then goes on to describe how such an image is deceptive (in its apparent simplicity), by describing the science behind it.
If this black hole is 55M LY away and the center of our galaxy should have one. So, why is it that we can see this one, but not the one at the center of our galaxy? Is it because there are things in our line of site with it?
2) The one in our galaxy is 1600x closer and roughly that much smaller, so they're approximately the same angular size.
3) They have tracked the orbit of a star that orbits our galaxy's central black hole through an orbit, and it goes ~2% (iirc) of the speed of light at closest approach, but it's nowhere near the event horizon. There are other things that have been tracked near A*, but nothing at the event horizon like this one.
[0]: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/30339/why-not-...
I don't really know if line of sight is a factor here though.
Further, of course a photo of a black hole is going to take some serious science and technology. If it were possible to do directly more easily then this wouldn’t be news.
If you plan grace the site with your visit be prepared to be forced to thank them for telling you about their tracking.
And if you actually plan to read the text be prepared to be forced to thank them for putting some advertisement in front of it.
I left feeling violated and disgusted.
