This is one of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen. Fascinating.
Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
201–210 of 525 posts
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interstellar also turned off the doppler effect, maybe to get a boring symmetric ring instead of an awesome asymmetric one as nature intended it to be!
IIRC, the black hole in Interstellar was also rapidly rotating, which I think was significant to how it looked: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac... > Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the…
I'm still wondering why the accretion disk from the released images isn't warped in a way we saw in interstellar. Are we looking at it top-down rather than from its orbital disk? would a differently oriented black hole look more like interstellar? Veritasium also has an explanation and I don't think it has anything to do with its spin.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#203There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...
From whatever videos I have watched I don't believe so called "flat earthers" really believe that the earth is flat. At most they seem to be trolls and just like to oppose whatever scientists say. So IMO nobody should waste time explaining anything to them.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#204Does anyone remember Interstellar. Their black hole simulation was based on hard science. Looks fairly similar
Interstellar is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. If anybody else is interested in reading more, the book "The Science of Interstellar" is fascinating and very easily digestible even if you're not big on physics.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#205Can someone explain in layman terms: If graviton particles or gravity waves travel at light speed, how does this information escape the event horizon?
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#206Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1]. TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
Not sure if I missed it, but can we tell which way the accretion disk is from our view of it?
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#207I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?
It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.
Consider yourself lucky that a black hole isn't Jupiter level distance from us.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#208So is a black hole 3 dimensional? Is it a sphere? Or does it only work in certain directions? Does everything "fall" the same direction? I ask because even in a brief history of time, the diagrams are very "single plane of space-time, pulled infinitely deep by the black hole"
Let's start a movement similar to flat Earth, but instead it's Spherical Black Hole. I refuse to believe that a black hole is anything but a sphere no matter what evidence I'm shown.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#209A small thing. It could have been nice if the scientists didn't have commercial bottled water on stage. As an example to the world. Reusable personal containers would have been nice.
Most scientist I know have a reusable water bottle on their desk. And a coffee cup. But it will likely have a cat or a joke of the "astronomers do it in the dark" flavour on it. Not something you typically want to show on TV. Also they traveled from their home institutes to the location of the press conference and got handed that plastic bottle by some well-meaning PR person.
For this event they could have purchased multiple use containers for each person. Wasteful but a better image. So not really their personal containers.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#210Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1]. TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
It doesn't seem to be that accurate, as expectation was for it to have smoother photo sphere, but it has irregular bulges (5 of them). I think they discussed it briefly in the press conference as well. It would be interesting to see if this would change understanding of general relativity and may be give a hint for a theory of quantum gravity.
What bothered me more about the video is that of you watch the whole thing, he ends up talking about some theory which leads to another type of image prediction. He never actually explains why he chose to go with the former prediction rather than the latter.