451–460 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?
Pardon my naïveté, I never took advance physics, but if light can't escape from a blackhole, then how can we "take a picture" of one?
Anyone else getting sick of the media calling this the first "PHOTOGRAPH" of a black hole? It's a spectrograph at best and more realistically a rendering. Don't get me wrong it's really cool but it's not a photo.
Anyone else getting sick of the media calling this the first "PHOTOGRAPH" of a black hole? It's a spectrograph at best and more realistically a rendering. Don't get me wrong it's really cool but it's not a photo.
You are wrong, this is definitely a photo, shot by multiple telescopes global-wise.
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.
If I understand it, this class of “telescope” is made up of arrays of telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries. As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on…
> It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.
This is the same constraint for the, let's call it, "peace on Earth" problem, or just "peace".
If only more of us could realize this is what it takes to solve that problem... which itself is part of the puzzle, i.e. how to increase awareness about the need to solve this.
While there are a number of people and organizations trying to do this, I see that there seems to be more possible fronts that could be used to tackle this and accelerating the reach for stability and sustainability of the state of peace.
One example of a possible front (and I honestly don't know if those already exist) is: through marketing it would be possible to influence people enough to be interested in the outcome of "peace on Earth" and pay some money for that, in a way that it doesn't feel like a donation, and more like an investment or maybe acquiring a service that would be hopefully realized in the coming years (hence the importance of the marketing capacity of that entity, as this mindset needs to be set in the consumers in order to make them buy the good).
Of course, the reporting to the consumers on the use of the invested money toward that effort has to be as transparent and honest as possible, as those approaches are arguably required for a sustainable state of peace. And hopefully it would make enough sense for an entity to operate in the way of the outcome it is seeking. Even though we are moving from a state of no-peace, which is hopefully unsustainable. In other words the effort could be be defined as "safely and confidently accelerating the maximum point of unsustainability of the no-peace state such that it inevitably transitions to a sustainable state of peace".
That's then possibly a private endeavor (not that it could not be a public one as well, but you need to raise enough money to pay for the possibly expensive marketing and then pay all of its employees), because there is now an identifiable market willing to pay some amount in exchange for obtaining the "product" of peace, which in other words just mean the modulation of humanity and its mindset in order for it to operate in such a way that it is always aligned to its own common good, or maximum known state of well-being, sustainably.
We already know that groups and individuals are not great at doing that, on average. So if an individual is not always able to operate towards its own good, or maybe some are but don't have access to the resources that would allow them to do so, how could then a group of individuals be able to do so? Unlikely.
And yes, exploring the universe and finding more about its mysteries and teaching humanity about them is a valid and great approach and a subset of all the possible approaches.
It is a subset because in order for an individual to be interested in knowing more about the mysteries of the universe, or consciousness and other topics, they have to have this mindset, well, set in the mind.
Therefore there are many more fronts that could be, and to many extents currently are, covered. So all I'm arguing here is we are not doing enough to reach the tipping point before possible big catastrophes happen, therefore we should do a lot more than what we're currently doing. There are many entity/company/organization models to explore that could benefit us in a spectrum of possibilities ranging from private to public.
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
Thus far, from all the experiment and result observed, the theory has been proven to be correct.
Hence, it can be said with 99% certainty whatever it predicts must be correct. I hope it does mention about possibility of creating a worm hole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video by Veritasium is by a guy who literally got a PHD on the subject of making physics more approachable through videos. He is exactly the person I would expect to provide a more clear and understandable explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be...
Why doesn't he work with the actual astronomers, then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wrong, this is definitely a photo, shot by multiple telescopes global-wise.
Multiple radio telescopes right? Then the data was compiled and rendered into an image, you really think it's that bright? How about orange? I wonder why it's not symmetrical? I suppose you can take multiple images combine them into one, run it through a bunch of filters and call it a photo but I still think it's more of a rendering than a photo.
A digital camera is just an array of tiny sensors that detect how much light hit them and a computer takes those values and renders an image from them.
> you really think it's that bright?
If you take a photo in a dark room with increased exposure then the resulting image is brighter than what you see with your own eyes. This was taken over a long period of time, effectively a long exposure. If you were close enough to see it at the scale you are seeing it on your computer screen it would probably be far brighter.
> How about orange?
As mentioned in another comment on this thread, it's just the colour scheme used in the output to show the brightness differences. The accretion disk is not necessarily orange, this photo is essentially greyscale mapped to a black -> orange -> white scale.
This is just an array of relatively large sensors with very high exposure gathering information from something very far away and combining that data in greyscale.
> I wonder why it's not symmetrical?
See Veritasium's video [1] on why it looks like it does, in short, the effects of the black hole and our angle to the accretion disk.