includes socks in laundry... "Once objects fall through the event horizon, they're lost forever. Although the event horizon is an imaginary line that's impossible to observe, astronomers have imaged the region around a giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, and measured, for the first time, the closest stable orbit in which matter can circle the black hole. The supermassive black hole in question lies at the center of the galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass of 6 billion suns. Using a new observatory called the EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE, which links up radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California, astronomers measured that the innermost possible orbit for matter around the black hole is roughly 5.5 times the size of the black hole's event horizon. This innermost orbit is about five times the size of the solar system, or 750 times the distance from Earth to the sun." - Adriano

Sheperd Doeleman and his colleagues have published the results of their study this week in the journal Science: "The derived size of 5.5 ± 0.4 Schwarzschild radii is significantly smaller than the innermost edge of a retrograde accretion disk, suggesting that the M87 jet is powered by an accretion disk in a prograde orbit around a spinning black hole." http://www.sciencemag.org/content... - Adriano