471–480 of 525 posts
they have not taken a picture of a black hole because that is not possible..
they have at best constructed an image of some effects of a black hole.
This is where top scientists do damage to science for ordinary people when they make fundamental errors in public statements.
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
Anything which is not in that radius or not already in a path towards it should be safe from not getting sucked by the black hole.
E.g. If our sun becomes a black hole, Schwarzchild radius would be 2.954Km i.e. anything outside ~3Km would be safe.
This was explained in the scishow video on that topic[1].
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Perhaps consider this: "VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6]." What's surprising about this image is how utterly microscopic the thing is that was observed - from our location. The width of the event horizon is 40 billion kilometers. That's only 267x the diameter of our orbit around the Sun. But the M87 b…
53 million light years. 26 thousand would still be in our own galaxy.
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It's actually in a galaxy called Messier 87 which is 55 million lightyears away.
The observed both supermassive black holes at the center of M87 and our Milky Way galaxy Sagittarius A
Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...
So how much this picture cost ?
It costs more to do a sciency Hollywood movie about than it costs to actually do the science. Sending an actual probe to the orbit of Mars is in general cheaper than making a sci-fi movie.
So...
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It's the color scheme. I think in matplotlib it's called "hot". I do a lot of 2D kernel density plots that by having a black zero level and dozens of contour levels produce a smooth look with aesthetics similarities to this. I used to use that scheme because "heatmaps" but stopped because of the pulsing illusion. I'm not sure if this image is real color or just lightness value and they used a color scheme for drama.
Grrr, why aren't scientists all using perceptually uniforms color schemes! This would still look awesome in `plasma`. Is there any where I can get the data and do it myself? One of my favorite talks ever is on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
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It probably wasn't coordinated, because he got the black hole that was being imaged wrong. He said we would see a picture of Sagittarius A*, but we actually got the black hole at the center of M87.
They observed both, watch the follow-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GVbuddri8 "The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration observed the supermassive black holes at the center of M87 and our Milky Way galaxy (SgrA*) finding the dark central shadow in accordance with General Relativity, further demonstrating the power of this 100 year-old theory."
Let's say I were to jump into this black hole for fun. What happens to me? What are the chances I go somewhere cool, like another universe, versus getting turned into a spaghetti noodle?
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May be we can see higher resolution if we build an additional telescope.
More distant (longer baseline), not merely additional sensors. Resolving power is proportional to the (virtual) aperture size, not the total sensor area (that gives more signal strength).