281–290 of 525 posts
Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...
Does that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?
The papers with the scientific details are here (open access): https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E... Article in physics world with comparisons to simulations: https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unve... "AskScience" AMA on Reddit about the breakthrough: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscien...
>"Hi, regarding the image itself: What I don't understand is why does it look like a donut and not a bright sphere? Assuming the black hole is actually spherical and not disc shaped, I would expect the Halo to be spherical and surrounding the black hole? so all we would see would be the ball of bright gas, even though there is a black hole in the middle?"
This is also what I would have expected.
Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808 Kip Thorne describes his work not thi…
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it. [0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...
Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.
I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)
There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.
Because if a black hole is a sphere, then shouldn't the whole thing be golden?
The EU is finally learning from the US when it comes making a lot of fanfare for discoveries and other inventions.
Why is the European Commission doing this? When I recognized Carlos Moedas I immediately skipped to what mattered. The reason why he was ever appointed as Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation is, to me, more remote than the black hole about which he knows absolutely nothing.
International collaboration on scientific projects (International space station, CERN) always fills me with hope and optimism for humanity. It's a nice contrast to opening the papers and reading the regular news, dominated by politics, with all the pessimism that creates. Hooray for science.
Good 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know for sure how that's defined (I ctrl-f'd and it's not explained in the paper), but this says the "North" is to the right of the image, and from context it sounds like it's the north pole of the accretion disk, i.e., the direction of the rotation axis with the right-hand rule. > The approaching side of the large-scale jet in M87 is oriented west–northwest (position angle $\mathrm{PA}\approx 288^\circ ;$ in…
In paper I, Figure 3, it says North is to the top of the image and East is to the left.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Einstein predicted the existence of black hole back in early 1915. Pretty amazing.
I thought (relativistic) black holes were first predicted by Schwarzschild in 1916? (As an aside, I have found a whole extra level to nominative determinism since starting to learn German — Schwarzschild = Black shield)
> In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does influence light's motion. Only a few months later, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations, which describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass.