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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=50+microarcseconds+*+%2... The answer is ~200 picometers. Wolfram lists some helpful comparisons: 1/2 the distance between base pairs in DNA 3x the atomic diameter of helium (the smallest atom) Suffice to say you'd have a hard time seeing it as it would be 3,000x smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

Hydrogen isn’t smaller than helium? Or hydrogen isn’t an atom?

Helium has the smallest atomic radius

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

#312
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resolution of these telescopes is limited by diffraction, not by the number of pixels on the sensors. The achievable angular resolution is roughly the wavelength divided by the aperture diameter [1]. JWST works in the few µm wavelength range and has a 6.5 m aperture, such that the angular resolution is ~0.1 arcsec. The EHT works with 1.3 mm wavelength and has an effective aperture of roughly the earth diameter (~…

Should have clarified. Does a black hole have fuzzy edges or sharp edges?

What do you mean by "edge"? The event horizon?

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General Relativity has pretty much nothing to do with planet formation. Newtonian gravity is good enough for that problem, and the problems have nothing to do with not understanding gravity well enough. The problems have to do with things like complex chemistry in stellar accretion disks, how grains in these disks stick to one another to eventually form rocks, and so on.

Whether the problems with the models are with general relativity, Newtonian gravity or other issues, the point is that the models have problems.

Which models are you talking about?

The fact that some models somewhere have problems has no bearing on whether the image reconstruction for Sgr A* is valid.

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

#314
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resolution of these telescopes is limited by diffraction, not by the number of pixels on the sensors. The achievable angular resolution is roughly the wavelength divided by the aperture diameter [1]. JWST works in the few µm wavelength range and has a 6.5 m aperture, such that the angular resolution is ~0.1 arcsec. The EHT works with 1.3 mm wavelength and has an effective aperture of roughly the earth diameter (~…

Should have clarified. Does a black hole have fuzzy edges or sharp edges?

Very sharp. Enough for quantum effects on the edge to produce Hawking radiation.

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

#315
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but those retractions are led by other astronomers/astrophysicists, not lay people presenting straw men. I think people's priors here are out of whack -- perhaps the truth does lie somewhere in the middle, but if so, it will be much closer to ETH's version than the OP's.

Astronomers/astrophysicists started first, by misrepresenting the process and bringing the talk of taking photos and having "visual evidence". "...We have seen, and taken a picture, of a Black Hole." https://youtu.be/lnJi0Jy692w?t=456

Yes? He’s correct.

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

#316
post #315
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astronomers/astrophysicists started first, by misrepresenting the process and bringing the talk of taking photos and having "visual evidence". "...We have seen, and taken a picture, of a Black Hole." https://youtu.be/lnJi0Jy692w?t=456

Yes? He’s correct.

There we go again...If you had a photo you not would need to make the merge of the four different images achieved by the four different teams.

Now the you have published the data from 2017, If I publish my own "photo", and I chose blue with spots of white, using the same library you used and the same color maps:

https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORM...

Why yours will be more a picture than mine in blue? Maybe I will even splint a little bit of red in there...

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

#317
post #316
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? He’s correct.

There we go again...If you had a photo you not would need to make the merge of the four different images achieved by the four different teams. Now the you have published the data from 2017, If I publish my own "photo", and I chose blue with spots of white, using the same library you used and the same color maps: https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORM... Why yours will be more a picture than mine…

I’m looking forward to reading your scientific paper.

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

#318
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Thanks for the correction. You're right, current scientific thinking is that the sun is not capable of going "supernova".

This has been bugging me. I was absolutely confident a (non-super) nova was an expected event in the evolution of sun-mass stars. Currently, though, the scientific term "nova" (excluding supernovae) clearly is applied only to a situation with binary stars, where a white dwarf siphons off matter from a less dense but heavier companion star. There are other specific things that happen to solar-mass red giant stars, such as helium shell flash, a rapid but short-lived change in brightness that can also leave a planetary nebula. Such an event could sound like it meets the definition of a "nova" but it doesn't meet today's technical definition of it.

It seems like the assignment of "nova" to a common stage of solitary low-mass stellar development is outmoded, so a change in nomenclature could help explain my confusion. For instance, this 1986 book https://archive.org/details/privatelivesofst00gall/page/68/m... states "Stars called novae explode and grow much brighter over a period of days or weeks, then return to normal again, usually over several years. Although we have ideas about nova stars, we have a lot more to learn about them. [...] When a red giant collapses and is well on its way to white dwarfhood, it may go through one or more periods of being unstable. At such times the star may erupt as a nova. This may be especially so of the more massive stars."

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

#319
post #317
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There we go again...If you had a photo you not would need to make the merge of the four different images achieved by the four different teams. Now the you have published the data from 2017, If I publish my own "photo", and I chose blue with spots of white, using the same library you used and the same color maps: https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORM... Why yours will be more a picture than mine…

I’m looking forward to reading your scientific paper.

And I am looking forward to have many other different teams reproduce your results independently.

I also would like to notice you did not explain why my blue "picture" would be less a "picture" than yours.

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

#320
post #56
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?

For quasars, don't the beams shoot out of the poles? Let's hope our nearby buddy doesn't become that active.

Nobody really knows the exact mechanism that forms the beams, but the beams definitely do not shoot out of the black hole. Of course that’s usually what you see in an artist’s depiction of them, but that’s a whole different problem.

The beams come from the accretion disk. There are two opposing beams because the disk has two opposing faces. The profile of the disk is narrow, so it stands to reason that very little radiation would leak out around the edge. On the other hand, there is a black hole in the middle of the disk and that should be smearing the beam out quite a lot. Somehow the magnetic fields and currents within the disk must conspire to keep the beam fairly narrow.

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