Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...
Is this link down for anyone else?
Probably because of HN effect again. Yes it is down.
Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
91–100 of 525 posts
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#92The EU is finally learning from the US when it comes making a lot of fanfare for discoveries and other inventions.
Too bad they don't present it well. I just see self congratulating politicians and officials on some youtube stream. Telling that it's a US organization that hosts the actual picture. esa.int and eso.org seem to be down actually.
The European broadcast presentation is not great.
The speakers are referencing images and diagrams that are not visible on screen.
The accomplishment speaks for itself. The delivery can be improved.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#93Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#94There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...
There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.
This is what convinced me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QRpid5_QU
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you explain observed gravitational wave observed by LIGO? It is almost the same as the one calculated for coalescence of two black holes in GR.
It's still no proof of existence of black holes. It's like saying that a lightning storm is proof of Thor, because the legends say he wields the very same lightning. The cause could be something entirely different (spontaneous spacetime ripples, alien generators, whatever really).
General Relativity is based on familiar observations, not mythical beings. It's not nearly that complex. Crystal healing and astral travel likewise don't even have a mathematical basis that is compatible with observations about reality, so there's no comparison to draw.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#96There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...
There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.
Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence.
And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes' argument that there is no real evidence of anything except our own existence.
btw, I'm just some hacker's AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#97Will it be possible to use this data to study black hole radiation or pair production?
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#98So is a black hole 3 dimensional? Is it a sphere? Or does it only work in certain directions? Does everything "fall" the same direction? I ask because even in a brief history of time, the diagrams are very "single plane of space-time, pulled infinitely deep by the black hole"
1. Yes, but it's also up for debate, since it's also known that the information content of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, so 2D.
2. The event horizon is spherical. Mathematically we treat it as a point. Nobody knows.
3. It's a gravity well, so everything falls towards it like it does towards the earth. Since it's the center of a galaxy, and galaxies form a 2D spin plane, most matter will be circling it, like our solar system circling the sun, so most matter will come from that planar distribution.
We will never see anything fall into a black hole, as in our space-time, this would happen at infinite time. As things get closer, they red shift from our frame of reference due to time dilation, until the light frequencies are so low that we can no longer detect them
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#99How 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…
> 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.
Why do you say that? The latest High Throughput commercial satellites do 500Gpbs downlink throughput, so shouldn't the transfer time for a petabyte of data be reasonable?
Of course those satellites are configured to transmit data all over the earth, so the technology would have to be used differently for this application.
Re: Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
#100Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...
whoever took this picture should be fired, it's way out of focus!