Black Holes

Apparatus

Sources

Detection quotes verified results. Modeled, inferred and observed are kept distinct.

Registers

  • Hard

    Astronomy and physics, with observed / measured / calculated / modeled / inferred / simulated / open labeled.

  • Lived

    Exact human chronology and the minimum artifact that establishes it.

  • Open

    Questions that appear when Hard and Lived are set beside one another. Not mechanism.

Neighbors

GW231029

GW231029_111508, GWTC-4.0. Primary catalog: GWOSC event page. Compact numerical provenance lives at THE 42 INDEX. Component masses are source-frame, 90% credible intervals, waveform-model dependent.

Kerr thin-disk efficiency

Novikov–Thorne thin, Keplerian, radiatively efficient disk. Efficiency η is the binding energy at the ISCO: the share of rest-mass energy that can reach infinity as radiation before matter plunges. Extreme limit 1 − 1/√3 ≈ 42.3%. Thorne, Astrophysical Journal 191, 507 (1974).

Plates

  • M87* shadow. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration / ESO eso1907a. Interferometric reconstruction.
  • Sagittarius A*. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration / ESO eso2208. Interferometric reconstruction.
  • M87 optical jet. NASA / ESA / Hubble heic2411b. NASA, ESA, A. Lessing, E. Baltz, M. Shara, J. DePasquale (STScI). Documentary image of the jet, not of the horizon.
  • M87 jet, multi-wavelength. Chandra / Hubble / Webb / VLA, 2026. NASA/CXC/Univ. Laval/C. Poitras et al.; processing NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare.
  • Cygnus X-1. Illustration: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss. Stellar-mass black hole with an X-ray companion; dynamics plus accretion, not a photograph of the horizon.
  • Gravitational lens / Einstein ring LRG 3-757. ESA / Hubble / NASA potw1145a. Telescope photograph of a lensed background galaxy, not a black-hole horizon.
  • LIGO Hanford Observatory, aerial. NOIRLab / LIGO / NSF / AURA / T. Matsopoulos.
  • Living field on the cover, in Spin, and in Information: a computed lensing shader. Model, not observation.