Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]

Post by privong » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

thatcherc wrote: post #68

zeristor wrote: post #45

How big a VLBI baseline would they need to see much more detail? Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start. Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.

Space VLBI is a thing already! Seems to have been around for a while [0][1]. I imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink bandwidth... there's just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about down from a satellite. It's already so much data that it's easier to fly hard drives around the world than to send it over the internet, so the transfer would probably take ages over a mic…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

typon wrote: post #61

jessriedel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you basing that on? (Edit:) From one of the papers released today: > The ring is brighter in the south than the north. This can be explained by a combination of motion in the source and Doppler beaming. As a simple example we consider a luminous, optically thin ring... Then the approaching side of the ring is Doppler boosted, and the receding side is Doppler dimmed...This sense of rotation is consistent with…

It's confirmed in the press conference by the scientists. They said its the Doppler beam effect

Post by Insanity » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #32

piker wrote: post #30

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?

Post by thatcherc » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #43

zeristor wrote: post #33

I wonder how it compares to the one from Interstellar? https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-t...

This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk). http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imagin...

Post by Insanity » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

TheHypnotist wrote: post #57

jessriedel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk). http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imagin...

Since we're on it, there's actually a book about the science of interstellar. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/03...