...Not by anybody I know.

:D

I'll bet the first caveman that learned to use fire had a neighbor that made similar comments, it's certainly been the domain of a long line of luddites down through the ages:rolleyes:

Yes this black hole is a long way from Earth but the pursuit of knowledge is priceless.

The better understanding of our Universe can only be a good thing.

Just to give you some perspective. This video does a really good job of explaining the distances to the nearest stars.
After watching it I can't see how we'd ever be able to visit these places. Certainly not in my life time anyway.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dCSIXLIzhzk" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

like man made climate change event horizons do exist, they are merely the edge an area of space-time that is so twisted that no object including a photon which always travels at the local speed of light and which is a particle of light can escape. The mass inside the event horizon has a gravitational field that bends space-time the more mass the more volume is bent and the more volume of space-time is included.

Black holes don't blow up, they are mostly inert except for their gravitational and magnetic fields, the do distort due to rotational angular momentum into an oblate spheroid similar to the shape of the earth due to it's rotation. Mass is on a one way trip when it enters the black hole's gravitational field but it's a rough ride, as it spirals in it passes Roches limit and is broken up into component particles that bump and grind against each other is what is called an accretion disc(it's more of a donut shape though), the friction heats the accretion disc to incredible temperatures causing it to emit all sorts of energetic radiation, the spinning accretion disk and the spinning black hole also generate enormous magnetic fields which give rise to polar jets, which are fountains of mass and radiative energy( these are the sources of the so called Quasar radiation)

Black holes do radiate away by a process called Hawking radiation. This process takes an incredibly long time to dissipate a large black hole , but eventually in the far depths of time they will all evaporate away.

Well, sir.

If you intended to refer to me as a Luddite, since I don’t know you, I’ll let that pass. Some people are just too closed-minded to understand the idea that one can be mesmerized by scientific progress and still question the relevancy of an object that existed 55 million years into the past that by definition is in a galaxy far, far away and long, long ago.

Some people are impressed by images of glowing donuts in space. Granted, in this case, by a very, very impressive glowing space donut.

Can we now just admit that we are an insignificant particle of dust? How much more proof do we need?

The Apollo program was a stupendous acheivement. We went to a place three days away by rocket generating many a tangible benefit not because it was easy but because it was hard. What it was was not impossible.

If anything currently in physics is to be believed, we will not go to, nor even survive if we did, anything 55 million light-years away, let alone a black hole.

I, being a Luddite, watched the symposium presented by the exultant scientists themselves wherein the acheivement was to affirm, in essence, that the sky is blue. The ramifications were profound also: that black holes affect galaxies, including (gasp) our very own Milky Way.

Not sure what your genuine argument is here.

Man will never go to the closest star let alone Mars, which is a big stretch.

What's the deal with the 55M light year distance? So what, if it's that far away?

What are you getting at except that it has no bearing on our existence?

That's not big news.

And if you knew more of archaeology you'd realize caveman knew how to make fire from the start.

How else did he see in caves? How would he make accurate cave art in the dark?

Unless you think they used electric flash lights instead of fire?

Very well explained by these scientists !

Lots of impressive engineering here using radio telescopes literally across the planet and the rotation of the Earth itself. If I read correctly, the BH light bending stuff is observable in real time as in days , even hours not eons.

That "Death star beam across the galaxy" has to be cool to most of us.... even the cavemen :)

No argument. Mostly a defense. I had the noive to come right out and say the effect on our lives of the subject of that remarkable photo is zero. For that I am a short-sighted Luddite, less capable than a caveman of introspection or abstract thought.

But in truth, I stand in awe of the person(s) who think this stuff up. Cosmology and astrophysics are, to quote, 'Fascinating'. Much of the concepts involved in formulating theories of space-time and gravity fields or whatever elude me even when they've been explained a hundered times. To even theoriize our way to the point of being able to focus our attention on something so big, so powerful and so far away is truly astonishing.

Albert E just pictured this kind of stuff in his mind without (much of) a hint or direction. He made up extremely strange stuff and it was correct. How does one have that much mental hp?

Hubble demonstrated mechanical proof the universe was expanding. He did not imagine it. He plotted it with state of the art early 1900's tools. He was wrong in his math, regarding expansion, but still on target. I minimize his contribution because he identified things (nebulae vs galaxies) that no one else did, but it was mechanical.

Two different animals.

Einstein was/is today's Newton.

From one Luddite to another. :D

Part of what was astonishing about that, we did it 50 years ago! Landed humans and got em home safe with computers with memory measured in bytes, not gigabytes.

Just yesterday Israel tried to soft land a probe. No life support systems, just an attempted soft landing on the surface. They failed, and it was just another impact crater on the moon. The list of countries that successfully managed to land a probe and take pictures is I believe USA, Russia, and China. Of course only our 50 years ago program put men on the moon.

Going to the moon is really hard. Even with 50 years of new technology available today.

I figure they need to scrap the metric system and go back to Imperial measurements used in the USA.

One of my many regrets in life is not buying a letter that he wrote when I ran across it 30 years ago. It was for sale at a rare document seller and was a hand written reply to someone that had sent him a letter asking some sort of a question, I cannot remember what at this point. His reply was short and sweet. It went something like this:

Dear so-and-so,

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Albert