301–310 of 525 posts
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
Can the equipment used from several places on earth for this be deployed in space (may be to a geostationary orbit)? Not thinking about cost for a moment is this a far-fetched thought or such a thing is technically possible.
Something that has been done for a while is using a single telescope in space in conjunction with some on Earth. Russia has a radio telescope in orbit called Spektr-R. I think it died recently, but Spektr-R did interferometry with other telescopes on Earth. When it was operational, I believe it was the widest VLBI array— its orbit was higher than GEO (and even intersected the moon's!), so it got pretty good distance from the ground.
I 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.
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…
In this video he makes a comment which I struggle to fully understand:
He says that ALL of the matter which belonged to the cooled-off star is DESTROYED in the process of creating a black hole.
That concept of complete destruction eludes me. I assume what he means is, the matter was converted entirely to energy. Right?
But if that's true - where is all of that energy? Is it stored (somehow?) in the Black Hole? Is it dispersed throughout the galaxy? What HAPPENED to the mass (energy)?
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
> Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does This is of course a bummer, since this means that the acquired image does not give us any new clues of where our understanding of physics is wrong.
Reasoning about an image of a black hole is very much within the realm of standard science. Veritasium was able to explain the prediction using essentially ideas that are so basic they're at the high school level. If our basic understanding of physics down to the high school level was wrong (e.g., very far from the research frontier), there would be very very serious issues.
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...
From reddit: >"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.
The thought struck me that the interferometry technique used must have gathered data from a much wider field of view than of just the black hole. Burried in that 5 petabytes of data is likely a scan of a much larger field of view at a similar resolution.
The US unveiling is WAY better than the EU unveiling that is linked to above. They have images, animations and graphs that's easily understandable by the layperson, and it's scientists instead of politicians speaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk They talk about how the image was produced, and how they made such a small image out of the 5 PetaByte of data they gathered from stations all over the world.
The US unveiling is WAY better than the EU unveiling that is linked to above. They have images, animations and graphs that's easily understandable by the layperson, and it's scientists instead of politicians speaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk They talk about how the image was produced, and how they made such a small image out of the 5 PetaByte of data they gathered from stations all over the world.