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Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

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Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#191

I'm sorry, I am really confused. Didn't we get "the first picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy" like 2-3 years ago? I definitely remember seeing a nearly identical photo, and lots of press coverage about a particularly young woman who was closely involved in the project. What that something different?

as crazy as it sounds: that black hole was actually in a different galaxy :)

Funnily enough, M87* is bigger than Sgr A* by about the same factor than it is farther away (~2000x ?), and these effects mostly cancel out so the effective resolution of each is about the same. They chose to image M87* first because there is less dust/gas obstructing the view through intergalactic space to M87 than through the bulk of the milky way disk.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#192
post #189
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are talking about the conversation we had here. So in this case you replied to a different person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281773

No, this one, same user, same skepticism, 19 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31134691 Btw we released the 2017 calibrated data today, too.

Thanks! You anticipated my question:-)

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#193

I am very skeptical of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) images because they are not following a scientific method that results in a true representative image of their target. In my opinion astronomy is jumping the shark with these images by making this a big PR stunt. I've looked at their methods for their earlier images and they seem to be hunting for a circle that looks like a black hole in their data. The EHT's f…

One can always rely on some commenter on HN assuming that professionals in another industry don't know how to do their job properly and just need some random programmer to tell them how they should actually be doing things.

I happen to live and work near JPL. The astronomers there have none of the qualms you do about this image, because it turns out the professionals working on this image actually took such things you're complaining about into consideration when refining the data. And if you had read the publication accompanying this image, you would have known that.

Also, they weren't just looking for a glowing circle...That's a shockingly ignorant way to characterize their work.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, simulations are in heavy use in galaxy dynamics. Two (example) research groups: https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/research/project/cfca.html > https://pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/research/science-field/computat... > and the most relevant wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_astrophysics >. Indeed today's event https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2208-eht-mw/ > involved many of the techniques mentioned on th…

Thank you for the pointers! By non-quantum I meant that to simulate the motions at that scale (including rotation) it seemed like you could go quite far just by using relativistic physics. But I guess there is not much ordinary about black holes so my mental model is likely quite a ways off.

Ok, I think there are a couple ways of digging out a question to answer from your comment as I understand it.

I believe you are asking about how to solve the trajectories of electromagnetic radiation generated just outside these central black holes, since essentially that's what determines the images released to the public today.

I'm going to restrict this to the "lens" of the production of hard X-Rays and gammas around a black hole by inverse Compton scattering. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011200/a011206/index....> has a pretty couple of visualizations. (It is not a coincidence that the swirls vaguely resemble some of the images that were revealed in today's ESO presentations.)

Pretty much nobody is using exact analytical solutions to the Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity to predict central black hole observables. Instead one uses a combination of numerical methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_relativity> and approximations to the full Einstein Field Equations including linearized gravity, the effective one body formalism, and post-Newtonian expansions (the wikipedia article for which has a handy chart of the domain of applicability for these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Newtonian_expansion>). One can do standard model physics set against any of these formalisms (or against several as things plunge inwards and/or climb outwards from the near-horizon) and get useful results.

If one sat down (as a theorist) and were to grind out an exact analytical solution (this would have to be for a very tiny sample of light-producing events to be tractable cf. [1]), one would find there is no need to make quantum corrections to the gravitational side of the Einstein Field Equations. The reason for this is that General Relativity guarantees a small patch of flat spacetime around every point everywhere. As long as the "small patch" is big enough to enclose an electron-gamma scattering event, there is no need for quantum corrections. This translates in practice to not having to introduce higher-order terms "correcting" the formalisms above for strong gravity, and in fact partially justifies each of those.

Where we worry theoretically is when spacetime curvature nearby is so strong that the "small patch" starts being smaller than a gamma ray. Smaller can be read as a combination of spatial extent vs wavelength or longer than the half-period of the frequency. When that happens, we have to mathematically stabilize the spacetime around the electron-gamma interaction in order to use the Standard Model's description of the scattering, and then we have to figure out how to undo the stabilization so the emitted photon has the right energy.

We would want to do this by adding in quantum corrections to whatever gravitational formalism we are using. These are easiest to see as additional higher-order terms added on to the Taylor-series-like post-Newtonian expansion.

It turns out that the strength of the local spacetime curvature (and thus the inverse of the extent of the "small patch" of flat spacetime: stronger curvature, smaller patch of flat space) outside even stellar-mass black holes is much larger than we need for pretty much any Standard Model physics to be feasible without -- or with only very gentle -- quantum corrections. For supermassive black holes, local spacetime curvature just outside the horizon is smaller than for stellar black holes, so the local patch of flat space everywhere near the black hole is much larger than that in any particle physics laboratory here on Earth. Since the tidal effects of Earth and the sun don't make much difference to physical experiments done at e.g. CERN, the even gentler tidal effects of Sgr A* and the weaker still tidal effects around M87* can basically be ignored.

Where do we start needing significant corrections, and start having to think about not using some of these formalisms instead of harder and harder work designing numerical methods based on the full theory of General Relativity? (For example, we might end up having to add many many many higher-order terms to our Taylor-series-like post-Newtonian expansion, each adjusting by something like a tiiiiiny 1/c^{ever larger number}). The answer: it's tractable until we are deeeeeep inside the event horizon, where we can't see the results of what's going on from outside. Very near the singularity the expansion approach starts requiring millions, billions, billions-to-the-power-of-billions of additional small correcting terms to retain accuracy, and it's a losing battle, even with mathematical tricks to shrink the number of terms and/or sizes of exponents ("renormalization", which is out of scope for this answer). At the singularity, this approach can only fail. Far from the singularity, but within the horizon of a large black hole, it works just fine. And in any event we only really care about what's outside the horizon, because we can't interact with anything inside: it just leaves no imprint for our telescopes to detect.

General Relativity and its approximations work perfectly well outside Sgr A* for known particle physics (and even some higher-energy extensions to the Standard Model).

Today's results fail to support several alternatives to General Relativity that correspond to a need for quantum gravity corrections just outside the horizon of Sgr A*. Among them are theories which predict "bouncing" or "reflecting" surfaces, and radiating compact stars (e.g. quark stars, boson stars -- things that are even more compact than neutron stars, but held up from collapse by an as yet undiscovered degeneracy pressure as in https://www.einstein-online.info/en/explandict/degeneracy-pr...> for electrons).

So, in other words, there is no need for a theory of quantum gravity for the findings made public today. (The findings do cause possibly fatal trouble for alternative theories of gravity that expect quantum effects just at the horizon of Sgr A*.)

- --

[1] a discussion of how this works, and a neat simulator, for one photon around a Kerr black hole: https://duetosymmetry.com/tool/kerr-circular-photon-orbits/>

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#195
post #162
post #148

Can the smart people in here confirm if we are getting sucked into this someday or not?

On the timescale from now until the sun goes nova, confident "no". Roughly speaking, the sun orbits the galactic center at a velocity of 220km/s. To fall into, or to be sucked into, the central black hole would require the loss of all this velocity, which means applying acceleration to the sun opposite the direction of its orbit. Lots of acceleration. That has to come from somewhere. I suppose there's some extremely…

[pushes up glasses]

The Sun is nowhere near massive enough to become supernova.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#After_core_hydrogen_exhaus...

It will become a red giant, and then eventually end up a white dwarf.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#196

I'm sorry, I am really confused. Didn't we get "the first picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy" like 2-3 years ago? I definitely remember seeing a nearly identical photo, and lots of press coverage about a particularly young woman who was closely involved in the project. What that something different?

That was M87, a different galaxy. Same group of scientists, though.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#197
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think you know more about astronomy than a team of scientists publishing peer reviewed information?

It’s absolutely in the spirit of science to question an experiment’s methods and results. If you disagree with the criticism then present some evidence. An appeal to authority is pretty unconvincing considering scientists have been confidently wrong about quite a lot in the past.

Criticism must bring substance as well. Sure, anyone can sit back and say “I don’t believe this, prove it better.” But without specific claims, such criticism can’t ever be answered and the conversation is not constructive or particularly scientific.

One constructive approach to criticism here would be to take the documented imaging process and apply it to other data. If it produces results that don’t match existing evidence, that would be evidence it is flawed.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#198
post #10

One of the findings they announced at the press conference is that the spin of the black hole is not aligned with the galactic plane but is tilted "towards us" so that it is viewed face on. How unexpected is that?

Kind of makes me nervous that both black holes we've imaged are pointing right at us. I'm imagining some super advanced civilization somehow using black holes as powerful telescopes that are for some reason intent on mapping out our region of space. I know M87 is 55 million light years away, so that makes no sense, but I'd really like to see some black holes that are looking in some other direction.

Is it at all possible that the glow is more of a spherical cloud and the black spot would be visible from any angle you look at it?

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#199
post #10

One of the findings they announced at the press conference is that the spin of the black hole is not aligned with the galactic plane but is tilted "towards us" so that it is viewed face on. How unexpected is that?

It may also precess, so that the axis of rotation is changing with time. Previous galactic collisions may also have caused two holes to merge into this one, with a net spin not orthogonal to the Galactic plane.

Re: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peer reviewed has nothing to do with the scientific method. It is just a layer of scientific bureaucracy. Just give me a calibration image of another celestial body and I'll be happy.

You realize peer review isn't just something you do and they automatically publish you, right? Peer review makes sure your science is sound. But I'm sure you're more of an expert than anybody serving in a peer review board.

Peers review the paper. The purpose of peer review is to ensure that the paper clearly communicates the work of the authors.

In the process of doing so, questions and clarifications may better reveal problems with the underlying science itself, which can result in the paper being withdrawn or declined. But peers don’t independently validate results.

At the same time it should be noted that published criticism has to meet the same bar. “You didn’t do the experiment the way I would have” is not really strong criticism. Experiments or observations can always be done better; this is a central ethos of science.

The strongest criticism is usually to conduct one’s own experiment the way one wants, and then show that it produced better results.

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