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Black Hole Picture Captured For First Time in Space 'Breakthrough' (theguardian.com)
Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself -- a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape -- is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
Article or it didn't happen? No source article?
The year we lost the two men who knew more about black holes than anyone else.
Vale Stephen Hawkins and Hugh Hefner.
I hope they keep on working....after all black holes are among the very few mysteries left to figure out and a possible source of development of "new physics". I was rather crushed that the LHC did not find anything new....confirming the Higgs was great but expected....I was hoping for new mysteries that might lead to something Sci-Fi like such as teleportation or FTL travel. Ahhh, reality is a harsh mistress!
Thank you, science... hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
across the universe all the way back in time and saw this
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
It is artificially colored. The actual "color" of the disk is not in the visible spectrum
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Black holes probably collect information on what was thrown at them. I wish any president would collect information with a similar ferocity, only to transform into the theoretical white holes when it's time to communicate instead to spewing destructive death rays from the both ends in case of information overload.
There is a 10 meter telescope at the South Pole that has been in operation since 2007.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
invisible? like the inauguration crowd?
You guys are obsessed... sorry to say it, but CNN and the like are going to get Him elected again because he's the only name on the ballot anyone will recognize. Happy #Trump2020
These were RADIO telescopes doing the observations, and the ionization of the gas/matter as it falls into the hole is what generates the "light", i.e., the electromagnetic radiation that the telescopes see. So the photo is real -- colorized for your entertainment pleasure like most astronomy photographs perhaps, but real.
But you just go put your MAGA hat on and publish pizza parlor conspiracies and be happy.
> truth to be found is in the Bible
Which one?
Is it really a picture of a black hole, or is it just a picture of the stuff surrounding something purported to be a black hole?
The Eye of Sauron. Confirmed by C|Net
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JYkMhQ9gf8
it was not "captured" but computer generated. this is no photo. radio telescopes don't take pictures, they record waves. Am I wrong?
It would be legitimate scientific inquiry to question the results of this work.
However, the OP is trying to associate scientific uncertainty with magical, religious, dogmatic belief in religion.
if you have to ask, you are already lost. i will pray for you.
Some of us understand that radio telescopes record (capture) radio waves, not visible light. The data can be processed and the result can be graphically output. My *guess* is the "image" is of a single frequency/wavelength (or a small range of) and does not correspond to what we'd consider a spectrum of emr. My other *guess* is that they converted intensity to image "brightness" but that could be done in many different ways. In an actual photograph, the light close to a BH should redshift as emitting matter nears the Event Horizon. So, is this a "real" image? No. (depending on what is meant by "image").
Well it is not emitting light, is giant enough to image from 50 million light years away, and looks exactly like scientists predicted for the last 30 years. If a photographer takes a picture of "you" is it really you or the light reflecting off of you?
For real. All they need to do is stop covering Trump and he will wither away. Who gives a shit if he's president? All he does is watch tv, play golf and talk shit.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Not exactly... the ring is actually "colored" in the X-ray region... I'm unaware of any detectable EM radiation emitted by the otherwise invisible portions of the inauguration crowd.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can't even get a decent photo of my black cat.
I think a diagnosis on his terminal stupidity is in order. He knows nothing about physics, knows nothing about why that ring of gas can be seen, and why that casts a shadow of the event horizon.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The actual black hole itself cannot be imaged. Light falling through the event horizon is pretty much gone (what exactly happens to it is still a mystery, and one of the problems of not having a unified theory encompassing GR and QM). But what has been seen is the shadow of the event horizon.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is How The Universe Works.
"The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across." - https://eventhorizontelescope....
Right, just like I say every time I see the picture of a cat. "Is it really a picture of a cat, or just the light bouncing off a cat?" ...
What happens when you look at a sphere from a very long ways away?
It resembles a flat disk.
What happens when you look at the event horizon of a black hole from a very long ways away?
It resembles a flat disk. Because it's a sphere.
I think you completely missed my point.... When the subject comes up, I have maintained for at least the past two decades that black holes really do exist. I have gotten into rather heated discussions on this subject with many people, and *BY FAR*, the most frequent objection I have heard from others to their existence is that we supposedly can't know they exist because we can't see them. This is an argument from ignorance, and is one that I absolutely loathe.
Obviously other no less ignorant arguments might exist, but hopefully this particular one can finally be put to bed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's a picture of the stuff around the black hole being occluded by the black hole's event horizon.
Also, we've gotten used to seeing radio images in this orange colour scale. Look at MeerKAT's first-light image for comparison.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Go back to high school Ms. Chaffer, your ignorance is showing. Your children have grown and your husband left you years ago for a funner, younger model; you have plenty of free time.
P.S. We know that there is a super massive black hole at the center of M87. Something about that Einstein kid's theory of gravity.
The disk exists for the same reason solar systems and planets and their moons, rings, etc, tend to form a disk. Things getting sucked in, but with trajectories slightly off center, then those things smashing into each other, symmetrical momentum cancels and falls in, while asymmetric momentum adds together, eventually resulting in an aggregate disk shaped mass orbiting the center. Google is your friend.
Veritasium did an excellent summary of how to understand and interpret what you're seeing in the image. Before the image was actually posted, he drew what all the models were anticipating, and you can see a lot of the features he spoke about in the actual image.
YouTube
When I saw the movie Interstellar, their image of a black hole seemed really hokey, but there's a reason for the way they drew it and it seems like parts of their conceptualization holds up fairly well.
[
As always the only REAL truth to be found is in the Bible
Posts as AC.
I recall something about the necessity to "proclaim your Christian faith". No?
Have gnu, will travel.
This is where all the Tax Money goes.
The observations are already giving scientists new insights into the weird environment close to black holes, where gravity is so fierce that reality as we know it is distorted beyond recognition.
Wouldn’t it be that reality is not distorted, but instead their knowledge of reality doesn’t match “real” reality. So really their understanding of reality is distorted, not that reality is distorted. So what they’re basically saying is that it’s not the scientist’s fault for being dumb or not understanding reality, instead, it’s reality’s fault, apparently for not matching their theories. Typical scientists! (Yeah, I know, I'm just being nit picky for fun - remain calm and stare into the reality of space).
It's a picture that even includes stuff behind the black hole. Check out this video.
Not quite. Itâ(TM)s possible fermions can form a tight sphere around a black hole at an infinitesimal distance from the event horizon, but bosons will smash into each other ultimately forming a spinning disk due to geometric irregularities. It's those same geometric irregularities that result in the black hole(and stars) having a "spin."
Does your phone spend days crunching through the data on a truckload of giant hard disks?
You DO realize that there is more then one religion, right?
Orange Halo with a large black hole in the middle? Yeah, the model fits... it does, it does...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I have my PhD in AstroFiziks from Liberty University and I can tell you that this "discovery" is nothing but Satan's illusion to lead us from SALVATION!
I also have my PhD in Evilooshun and I can same the same about the so-called fossils.
And with my Medikal Doktor from Liberty, I can assure you that all scientific knowledge needed by God's children - Man - is in the Bible.
After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
If you watch the Werner Herzog documentary/movie "Encounters at the End of the World" they have an interview with the guy that runs the telescope, and also some footage - pretty cool.
There's also a whole book around it though pretty dense, called The Telescope in the Ice if you want to know more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looks really irritating. I wonder if it has asteroids.
I see the hole but I don't see the golden ring.
I sprayed my cat with Vantablack, now she's just a two dimensional shape shifting blob moving around.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
no
Yes and Yes.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Sound of Silence
Losing my religion
Sun researchers find strange eclipse reading
Next total eclipse: July 2, 2019 South America/Pacific
I'm truly in awe at this. I just looked at a picture of the black hole in the center of M87. It is mindblowingly far away, and one of the most exotic things in the universe.
I honestly never thought that we'd do something like this in my lifetime.
100 years ago we didn't know that black holes existed. In essentially one human lifetime we went from not knowing something existed to building a planet-sized telescope to look at it. It is so far away that while we can put numbers on it, it's still just an abstraction because we can't really understand the scale of what we're dealing with.
Think of how far 1000 miles or 1000 km really is. Imagine driving that. Imagine walking that. Now slap 11 zeros onto that. No, not "imagine it 11 times", 11 orders of magnitude larger. Imagine that 1000 miles/km is the width of a human hair. Slice the earth and half and lay them down to span the diameter of the earth. That's ballpark the scale that we're talking about. Imagine how many hairs it would take to span the diameter of the earth. It's an unfathomable number. That's how many times 1000 miles away this thing is.
When the light left the accretion disk around this black hole, the K-T extinction event was relatively recent history.
And with SpaceX seriously cutting launch costs, and potentially being able to reliably reach past the moon's orbit, we'll likely have telescopes with an effective resolution larger than the earth in the not-too-distant future, and we'll be able to image this and other things in even higher resolution.
Holy shit are we an incredible species.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
the most frequent objection I have heard from others to their existence is that we supposedly can't know they exist because we can't see them.
We cannot see them if there is no accreting matter [as in very old BH's]
Here's my ignorant argument:
We are outside of the black holes we might see.
We see things close to the event horizon slow down and come to a complete stop when they reach the horizon.
So just before a black hole forms, stuff as seen by an outside observer slows down. The instant of formation of the hole, everything at the horizon is stopped.
So from the outside view, all we see is an image that is asymptotically approaching the state of being a black hole. It can never get there.
Tell me why I'm wrong. I'm no physicist, they're taking photos of thing and I'm wrong about lots of things.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You can't really "see" a black hole of course. But you can infer its there. Blackholes aren't invisible in the sense an invisibility cloak from fantasy. They just appear as a black disc because no light escapes them. So I guess depending on your perspective and definition of "see", you can see them if there is a suitable background to place it on. Blackholes look like the blackest black possible. Zero definition in texture or form. I would imagine if we ever managed to fly a spacecraft close enough to one to look at it with our eyes it would be really really hard to look at. Maybe even vertigo inducing.
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question...
aRTee
The Unix Bible?
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Is it the one in the orginal Attic Greek, or Latin, or the KJV, or NKJV. Do you include the Apocrypha?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I hate to be this guy but...
Actually, the heliospheric model of the solar system was adopted early on not because of science but because of.... astrology. You see, the heliospheric model made it easier to do astrological calculations instead of the old crystal sphere within crystal sphere model. Even the scientists couldn't agree but once the astrologers used it as a short cut to their calculations many people began accepting it as fact.
Even worse tho is that we're about 400 years since the heliospheric model's acceptance and most of you self-proclaimed enlightened folks probably couldn't defend the model based on true science against the arguments of the old earth-centered universe model.
So take up some kindness. Science is meant to be a candle in the dark, not a weapon to make yourself feel powerful.
It's a picture of what you'd see if you looked at a black hole, albeit with some false color modifications, which is generally what we think of when we say something is a picture of something.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I always figured the term black whole refers to the entire structure; singularity, accretion disk, event horizon, relativistic jets (is that what they really call those? Pretty cool if so), etc. So we do get to see the black hole, except for certain parts of it, like the singularity and anything behind the outer layer of the event horizon.
I guess a simple analogy would be that you consist of the visible you and what is beneath the skin. Unless you find a way to bend light around yourself, we still see you; we just don't get to see the underlying components of you.
(Okay, the analogy sounded better in my brain, but it works well enough for this discussion.)
The real mind fuck question is "What would a singularity look like?"
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If you look where you expect to see a black hole, and see something black surrounded by light, this "black hole" does not prove the existence of the object described by the theory of "black holes" which states a point of infinite density from which light can not escape. It's indeed something black in the middle of a galaxy. Statements regarding the discovery, to be scientific, should say "alleged black hole". An equally, or even more plausible explanation, would be that the galaxy contains a bowl-shaped magnetic field at its center which results in the observed shape. This theory does not require the existence of black holes, and also explains how the galaxies are held together without the need to invoke an undefined "dark matter." For some additional background on this theory (which does not explain how the magnetic field is formed) search YouTube for the 3-part series "the Primer Fields."
It's a post to someone who thinks black holes can't exist at all. "Sphere" is close enough.
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question... aRTee
That is much of what you are seeing. The ring you see in their photo is the accretion disk, but it is actually the back top and bottom of the accretion disk behind the black hole that shows up due to gravitational lensing. The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge. The bright area of the ring is the side spinning towards us and the dim away from us. The accretion disk probably goes through the center of the shadow and the dim part between the two brighter spots. Perpendicular to that, you can see faint areas outside the black hole that are probably the jets. The black area is the shadow, basically, the area where light from behind is dragged into the black hole. This is 2.6 times the size of the actual black hole's event horizon. This is a very fuzzy image made from different pictures with a resolution of a bit smaller the size of the shadow we are seeing. That's what I've learned in the last half hour of watching you tube videos explaining what they expect to see and how to interpret it anyhow.
And Sagittarius A is probably the reason the deep time civilizations on the opposite haven't been able to easily get over to our spiral arm. The gravitational effects from S-a kept flinging them way off course so they could only get over this way by sheer luck.
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Should have been on the opposite side of the galaxy. Java error on my part (as in was not finished with the first cup).
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After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
The Register could not resist in their reporting and made that joke for you.
According to the physicists, stuff around the black hole is moving very fast (imagine a coin circling around a deep drain) so no, what we're seeing is "current" (however many light years ago it actually happened) and not from the formation of the black hole
Is a selfie really a picture of a person or just a picture of the electrons near the surface of a person?
I'm still waiting for a group of shitlord astronomers to officially name a Goatse Nebula and a Goatse Galaxy.
And taking this train of thought further, I propose that 46 Capricorni be declared Goat C (considering the Capricorn constellation can be called the Goat.)
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You haven't really read the bible until you've read it in the original Klingon.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I remember seeing a simulated prediction of what they expected a couple of years ago, and it pretty much matches.
Here's one such article with illustrated predictions, although it's not the same article I remember.
Table-ized A.I.
Radio behaves exactly the same as all other EM radiation, we just think of the various types in different terms - e.g. gamma and X-ray are generally thought of in energy units (eV), UV/visible/IR in wavelength (nm), and microwave/radio in frequency (Hz).
The famous 21-cm hydrogen line, detected by radio telescope at 1420MHz, is a well-understood quantum phenomenon and is definitely an emission of a photon It's just detected electronically, rather than by a photochemical reaction of a silver halide on film. Same as most visible light photos these days...so I'd say while I get your gut feeling, there's realistically no difference between a radio telescope image and an optical one nowadays.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
OK, but how did the outside view of the hole ever get to us? How can a stopped thing (in our reference frame) grow?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Here's my ignorant argument:
We are outside of the black holes we might see.
We see things close to the event horizon slow down and come to a complete stop when they reach the horizon.
So just before a black hole forms, stuff as seen by an outside observer slows down. The instant of formation of the hole, everything at the horizon is stopped.
So from the outside view, all we see is an image that is asymptotically approaching the state of being a black hole. It can never get there.
Tell me why I'm wrong. I'm no physicist, they're taking photos of thing and I'm wrong about lots of things.
Really you only see any hole, because of the thing(s) around it, and the absence of those same things...not in the hole? Difference is no light shining though a BH, from the other side.
It does further prove the existence of the concept of a blackhole existing. As for the exact definition, that is yet to be confirmed. Though prior existing evidence pretty much proved that something with the density of a blackhole existed, we just never had a picture of one, even though we could see how it interacted. Even the whole gravity wave measurements were enough to prove that they existed and that the merging works nearly identical to how we predicted it would.
LOL! Nice.
The HBO TV series True Blood used a similar joke with the "Book of the Vampyr" aka the original (vampire) bible older then OT. Which is kind of ironic that the Judaic Torah completely censored Lilith, Adams first wife, before Eve hijacked the narrative.
Apparently the mods are extremely cranky today or woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Ask a legitimate question and get marked as troll. LOL. Guess someone is hyper-sensitive that their belief isn't the only perspective and too insecure to admit it.
Just another day on /.'s groupthink.
Here's my ignorant argument:
We are outside of the black holes we might see.
We see things close to the event horizon slow down and come to a complete stop when they reach the horizon.
So just before a black hole forms, stuff as seen by an outside observer slows down. The instant of formation of the hole, everything at the horizon is stopped.
So from the outside view, all we see is an image that is asymptotically approaching the state of being a black hole. It can never get there.
Tell me why I'm wrong. I'm no physicist, they're taking photos of thing and I'm wrong about lots of things.
Really you only see any hole, because of the thing(s) around it, and the absence of those same things...not in the hole? Difference is no light shining though a BH, from the other side.
The light shines around the black hole. Then you have to ask: Why is this matter in a halo arrangement around a dark void, and what's keeping it there? If the answer is not "magic", then maybe it's a gravitational source so strong that not even light can escape from it. ; )
Did it grow, or did it come into being at the size it is? Are we seeing the cruft around an age 0 core, or is something else going on that I haven't understood?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Well, the only reason it's a question you can't wrap your mind around is because it's a question that has stopped having an answer beyond "nothing." Sight is the sensation you get when your brain interprets photons hitting your retina. In a singularity, light cannot escape to hit your retinas (ignoring the fact that your retinas can't exist there either), so how could you possibly see anything?
It's kind of like asking, "what would a bunch of astronauts clapping sound like to another astronaut in space?" The medium for experiencing the sensation has failed, so the question doesn't even make sense.
Learn the skills and you are free to go and double-check their work, if you wish. Until you do that, it's just blather. Then some idiot will come up to you and say you're lying, it's all just religion.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
the event horizon is not a "stopped thing"
black holes do grow from our frame of reference as things fall in, actually it's wrong to say things slow down as they approach the event horizon, instead the event horizon grows to engulf those things as they are slowing. The simplistic explanations of things falling into black holes in popular press are wrong.
Because it's the last bit of "stuff" that actually CAN manage to escape the black hole. Anything past that does not escape. You realize that to go from being able to do something to not being able to do something, there is an instant in time that is the last instant you can actually do something right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That popular explanation is actually wrong. Indeed things slow and are red shifted from our point of view as they fall towards event horizon, BUT the event horizon also is growing and eventually engulfs those things. That's the part often left out. Black holes grow, even to outside observers. Things get engulfed and disappear into the event horizon in the case of a growing black hole, even to outside observers if they wait long enough. The event horizon even from our point of view is not frozen in size.
Wow I wish you had mentioned this 50 years ago. Billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours would have been saved...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Is that why you made me bring a Coke bottle and loose clothing today, Father?"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
" ... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Have gnu, will travel.
So just before a black hole forms, stuff as seen by an outside observer slows down. The instant of formation of the hole, everything at the horizon is stopped.
So from the outside view, all we see is an image that is asymptotically approaching the state of being a black hole. It can never get there.
That is true. The initial collapse that forms the black hole takes an infinite amount of time to complete for a distant observer. However, there is a finite time after which you can not interact with the outer surface material of this object. The rate of collapse will outpace anything attempting to touch it, even light (time is not slow for a local observer). That is, if you shine a light on it, the surface will fall down too quickly for the light to touch it and reflect off it. We say, therefore, that after this time, we have a black hole.
All my cats are black, you insensitive clod. You're looking at a blank monitor...
Most of us have never seen Donald Trump in person, so any images we have seen of him are blurry blob of colors from number crunching a vast amount of data. And yet we all know what we are seeing and trust that he's real. Your problem appears to be that you don't trust math. That's your problem, don't hang it on us.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
People pointed at the sky and said "What's wrong with you? Can't you see that the Sun goes around the Earth? Idiot!"
They've captured a blurry blob of colors from number crunching a vast amount of data. How much easier than geocentrism is it to fuck up the interpretation of that?
Your remark is religious in nature, and not at all scientific.
Once again, some buffoon thinks that their ignorance is the equal of others knowledge...
Re-read the rebuttal until you understand it.
Perhaps you don't understand what you're talking about?
Unless your cat is made of aluminum foil you now have chicken wings made out of cat.
We still haven't imaged a black hole. All we've managed to do is image a black hole's accretion disk.
In addition, LIGO has captured a few brief snapshots of black holes getting jiggy. But I'd wait another year on that one, until we're extra sure that the sophisticated LIGO software isn't taking phantom snapshots of it's own software-filter afterimage.
Perhaps you should begin by schooling the Hillbillies in the community hot tub whom you persistently engage what it means for modern science to "image" something. Just for starters, atomic force microscopes are blind as a bat (though really damn good at Braille).
Given this image and whatever else we know about this black hole, seems like it should be possible to create a model simulation of the black hole based on that. The broad characteristics of the model could be "reverse engineered" from the image, and fine tuned so that if you view the model from the same angle with the same resolution it produces the same image.
Then once you have that model, we could look at the simulation in greater detail.
Granted, the extra detail is not real, but at least it would be nice to see what the model would guess, based on our understanding of the physics of black holes.
Hmm ... maybe this isn't a bad question? If a black body (super giant planet or something) orbited in front of a large bright object (e.g. a star) wouldn't the back side of the object be black like this?
In hindsight, expectations of seeing an Einstein ring around the event horizon may have been overly optimistic. It's hard to imagine the event horizon is the size of our solar system.
It was about money, and the picture was probably generated by CGI to get more money to spend from the government funding agencies.
It is artificially colored.
So, that would be a yes?
With Russian annotations of coarse.
FTFA "The success of the project hinged on clear skies on several continents simultaneously and exquisite coordination between the eight far-flung teams."
Why are clear skies a requirement of a radio telescope? Or is this just the popular press version of a science story?
I reflect light. Black holes do not. I submit you cannot photograph a black hole because it is, after all, a black hole.
If it cannot be imaged, you do not have an image of a black hole. Rather, you have an image of something other than a black hole.
I had been wondering, why it was that we seemed to be so lucky as to be looking exactly above the accretion disc... watching the video helped to understand why the angle didn't matter so much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And their conquest of known space was really the little Jihad.
They only stopped it when a Jew, an Amish, a Catholic, a Mennonite, and an Arab met in a space bar and after all getting fatally stabbed, killed the klingon when he slipped and fell on his knife on the infidel human's blood, thus proving god had a plan for them all :)
Is it my ignorance, or is it simply your ignorance reflecting off of me? I am sure that everyone who knows you recognizes your tremendous aurora of utter ineptitude reflecting off of all objects.
You may "know" that there is a black hole at the center of M87, but that is your FAITH in young Master Einstein's theory matching up with some observations. But, in fact, you know nothing. You are simply spouting things you have heard, like a parrot imitating a televangelist.
So, let me know when you get that picture of a black hole (you know, made form the photons that actually come from the black hole forming an image on your photon recording device of choice). In the mean time, learn to keep your mouth shut while the grownups are talking. Besides, I'm sure your supervisor is wondering where the young idiot who mops the floor is goofing off. Better get back to work before you lose this job, just like the countless others.
Exactly, there's no truth in advertising!
Is it really a picture of a black hole, or is it just a picture of the stuff surrounding something purported to be a black hole?
If you take a picture of a hole in the ground, is it really a picture of the hole, or just a picture of the stuff surrounding the hole? Do you routinely question the existence of holes in the ground?
The orange stuff if the other dimension returning all of the fake news that has fallen into the black hole.
Is it my ignorance, or is it simply your ignorance reflecting off of me?
Ms. Chaffer is so fat, her Gilette ad is causing Twitter to explode, but at least photons can still reflect off her.
Lilith didn't morph into Adam's wife until the late common era (700AD or so). In older works, she's a night hag, a generic witch creature.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From TFA:
in one night the EHT generated enough data to fill half a tonne of hard drives
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
Yes, just the same as the president's hair.
Because high water vapour levels block submillimetre waves.
and *BY FAR*, the most frequent objection I have heard from others to their existence is that we supposedly can't know they exist because we can't see them. ...
Obviously other no less ignorant arguments might exist, but hopefully this particular one can finally be put to bed.
Two responses:
1) No, you can't put it to rest. Idiots will always argue something proven wrong no matter how many times and ways it is proven.
2) Yes but that proof is trivially easy.
"It can't exist because I can't see it"
"Then let me turn out the light and punch you in the face for a few minutes. You can't see me so the punches to the face don't exist, yes?"
Referring back to #1, there are idiots that will agree being punched in the dark means they weren't punched, no matter how much blood is about and how bad it hurts.
When they claim we can see the blood so know the punch existed, that requires them to finally agree that even things we CAN see don't prove something exists:
https://i.imgur.com/liT2ZMz.gif
True enough. That's where science journalism frequently falls short, with sexed up headlines. But even being able to see the event horizon is one helluva an achievement, and gives us an opportunity to see gravity at work in probably the most extreme environment in the Universe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
After spending two years synchronizing eight telescopes, transporting the data by physically flying the hard drives, and months of rendering a composite image, we finally have a somewhat fuzzy image of Chuck Norris' anus.
Sorry but my bullshit detector went through the roof 5 minutes into the video part 1 "Primer Fields".
It should have done it sooner but I was lazy to lookup the US patent. I checked that when I turned off the video - Power generation device
US 20080246361. Yeah. Everything checks out.
Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.
Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.
Well, we know that objects so dense that they do not emit light, do indeed exist... but their true nature is still very much an open question. Something this strange shouldn't exist at all because it either breaks quantum mechanics, or it breaks relativity, depending on how we define this strange thing. So, we know what we are looking at is a black hole, but we don't really have a proper understanding of this thing which we have named a 'black hole'.
A bit of light reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)
Certainly is amazing. I just hate the headline.
He just doesn't need to throw pearls before swine, that's all.
Nah, that's not fake, it really is orange hair...delicately seasoned with a special orange dye imported from a West African country specializing in henna dyes. Don't tell anyone or his right wing-nut followers will get their knickers in twist.
I suppose that this is exactly what separates me from Wile E. Coyote.
Actually, I often have to scrutinize photos sent to me. And, yes, I do often question if things are a hole or just something that appears to be a hole.
Besides, do holes really exist, or are they the absence of something? After all, cold does not exist, it is the absence of heat. Yet, people claim to feel "cold" all of the time.
So, let me ask, do you think the lines in this sidewalk are really floating? https://mymodernmet.com/3d-cro...
No, he performs real damage with what limited power he has and his lackeys in the Senate. He's making the courts more conservative for years to come by nominated young right wing-nuts and McConnell is pushing them through to confirmation as fast as he can.
The goal is for Trump to have no oversight via the court system. McConnell and the rest of the Rs in the Senate, every last one of them, is complicit.
He's also doing whatever he can to fuck up the environment because he believes that will yield fast growth and thus his re-election.
He has a similar game plan for the Fed, get them to lower interest rates to spur growth. The fact that it will spawn a runaway inflation with all the red ink from his last tax giveaway is immaterial to him.
LOL such weak sauce
"Character matters to the presidency, and Donald Trump will bring the highest level of integrity to the highest office in the land."
– Mike Pence
Good explaination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Wow. I haven't heard a good "xxx is so fat joke" in decades---and I am still waiting.
By the way, you are so fat that everything appears distorted due to gravitational lensing.
Also, the obligatory maternal insult: Your mother conforms to Planck's law. The greater the frequency with which she screws, the more energetic she gets.
Coincidentally, thanks to the uncertainty principle, you will never know who your father is.
So, how soon until we send a ship through it to see what happens?
Or perhaps you don't quite understand that press releases do not include the highest-resolution images? Or that RF images are not as "crisp" as visual light images?
Why stop there, ride the reductive process all the way to the Descartes Demon. You do not have the "image" of any thing at any point in your entire life. Rather, you have rods and cones shooting off some neurons, to an all-trusting lump of fat in bone. There is no such thing as an "image" at all.
Yes, the headline is hype bullshit and there's nothing new about seeing accretion. And I'm sure the facetweet crowd decided to swarm about it, happy to say something that associates them with more intellectual pursuits than fortnite and minions. But a pedantic "no it's not" won't make the shitshow end any sooner, you'll just have to weather it out.
Look at the liberal bot. He's done no such things.
Economy is better, unemployment is down, stocks are up and Texas border judt completed its section of the wall.
My income taxes have been lower and a little nicer refund thanks to new write off credits
And next to it's a nebula in a Klan hood.
Some maths say dark matter/energy exists, some other maths (quantum inertia) says dark energy/matter does not exist.
My taxes went up significantly and there are signs of a serious recession looming...
I think you all need to adjust the picture on your televisions. I've never seen anything resembling orange on Trump's head. Maybe the news channels you're watching fuck around with the color to make it look orange, but it's NOT orange.
Have you ever seen him in person? If you had, you'd never think he had orange hair.
Last night I saw upon the stair
A Little man who wasn't there.
I saw him there again today.
I wish, I wish, he'd go away.
"2.5 times smaller"
We don't measure smallness. We measure size. "A bit less than half the size of the shadow" would be a lot clearer.
His hair seems less orange due to the orangeness of his skin.
Do you know what a false-flag is?
I'm pretty sure that doesn't answer the question at all. The question, as I understand it, is this: If a black hole is a sphere, why would we not expect objects to spiral into it in every possible orientation, similar to the way comets orbit our sun on random planes? And if they do, why don't we see those objects in front of the black hole, rather than just seeing the black disc?
The answer, I think, is that solar systems tend to flatten out over time because of the influence of gravity, and black holes are presumably very, very old suns.
But I am not an astrophysicist, so take that with a grain of salt.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The black disc in this image is not the event horizon -- it's the limit to which matter can orbit in a stable orbit. If matter moves closer than this, which is 2.6 times the radius of the event horizon, it will spiral down quite quickly to the event horizon. So this region around the black hole is pretty empty.
I just heard from the evil demon. It is disappointed that you think it even needs rods, cones, and neurons to deceive me. Of course, it almost has me convinced that I am no more than a brain in a jar. What really whips up the water I am floating in is is wondering why the evil demon wants me to believe that black holes are surrounded by something colored like Trump's hair.
This guy gets it.
LOL. What makes you think you aren't being trolled by somebody posing as an ultraconservative? I generally find these supposed posts from people who believe literally in the Bible to be highly suspect.
Yo mama is so fat she has a Schwarzschild radius.
if black holes are real, shouldnt galaxies be spheres not discs ?
there is no black hole in the center of hurricanes or tornadoes, just nothingness
seems to me, the galaxy is the analogy of a hurricane, a giant spinning vortex, no black hole required
something making it spin though, but other vortices dont need such contrived artifices to explain their movement ?
Yo mama is so fat that she would not emit radiation even if the universe cooled to 0K.
The stock market has grown the same rate from 2016-2019 as it did from 2013-2016, and we're expecting a recession. So if you're up for owning the stock market, GLHF. https://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average-last-10-years
The unemployment rate actually decelerated. Are you owning that? https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
The current border crisis is too many people just walking up and turning themselves in to CBP, so what, turn off Mexico... stop sending aid to the countries these people are coming from? It's like you elected Homer Simpson, I swear to god.
...and cannot spell Gillette.
This pillock used the word "funner" and then asserts that the other person should go back to high school. The existence of this numbskull's ignorance is not conjecture.
Wait but earth is still flat right???
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
Instead of taking mere naps between the "cocaine light"(coffee)-fueled slaving away for your owners.
How about getting a profession instead of a mere job.
How about offering work that somebody begs to pay, instead of begging to work for somebody who offers pay?
How about not turning on any lights after 9pm and before 3am, and no non-yellow-red-ish lights after 6am/pm?
Then you can sleep enough for a human, and never need drugs just to not be mentally impaired.
I find it pretty curious the huge attention that these issues (e.g., when gravitational waves were firstly "found") get; way beyond what other news in virtually any other scientific or non-scientific field get! I just mean full coverage in all the media worldwide, but also in popular culture, internet... everywhere! People with virtually no scientific/technical/physics knowledge, not even truly understanding what is the actual point of this "discovery" (or the real validity/applicability of the underlying theory) sharing their tremendous joy about it! They behave as if we, as species, have made a huge accomplishment! Personally, I don't quite understand all the passion which things like new rockets or going to Mars provoke in some people, but at least I find that much closer and relevant for different reasons (but the associated attention is orders of magnitude lower!).
It reminds me behaviours traditionally linked to deep faith/religion. People getting very happy with stains on the wall looking like Virgin Mary because of implicitly proving that their whole faith is fully validated! For example, if I had the theory that 2+2 is 5 and, for that reason, tomorrow it will rain. Should my followers start blindly defending that 2+2 is 5 because it did actually rain?! NO. Even by assuming that the subsequent event actually and spontaneously happened (I didn't see any weather forecast), that wouldn't automatically validate any starting premise which I proposed. Even if that thing (i.e., nice looking pic really telling nothing) was actually representing even a remotely-related-to-the-theory version of what a black hole is supposed to be (an ironically impossible to be seen/experienced/interacted with/witnessed phenomenon), it wouldn't automatically validate any theory, much less when talking about something so unmanageably huge and comprehensive (expected to have overall applicability!!).
So, here you have the main steps to validate any theory. Firstly, look at the theory itself and make sure that it is completely coherent (with itself and with all what surrounds it, physics/mathematics in this case). Then, make sure that the empirical measurements are reliable (are you sure that all these data points which a very complex system collected from a veeeeeeeeery far location are OK, and that the subsequent model/interpretation/pic accurately describes what they represent?). And finally, confirm that those measurements are really related to the given theory (is this data set really describing a phenomenon which is similar enough to what the theory assumed that should exist?). Have you done all that? Then, you could definitively state that the theory is confirmed (at least, one part of it). Are you just looking at a picture which someone (better: a surprisingly big number of someones) told you that shows what, by definition, can't be shown and that this fact alone proves something? Well... you are free to be happy and to believe in whatever you want, but you shouldn't say that this is a (scientific, reliable, even logical) proof of anything. It is a picture really showing nothing, really proving nothing and whose whole value is based on the assumption that a huge number of people/interests and a tremendously complex system, precisely built to come to that conclusion ("after spending billions, we have discovered that we were wrong and all this has been a tremendous waste of time/resources" doesn't sound like a too probable outcome here, right?), have done everything right and built a surprisingly accurate, descriptive and easy-to-understand-for-everyone version of a very complex reality.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Reminds me of a cat joke about the difference between a philosopher and a theologian: “A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.” - H.L. Mencken
Gotcha. Thank you.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Did it grow, or did it come into being at the size it is? Are we seeing the cruft around an age 0 core, or is something else going on that I haven't understood?
Sorry I see your point now, what's the age - hence size - now, if time is effectively stopped from our perspective. Honestly I don't know.
You know what, I had that in my head when I was typing it but the joke just didn't seem as funny that way.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I generally find these supposed posts from people who believe literally in the Bible to be highly suspect.
Meet some of them in person. Just as firmly attached to literal biblical truths as the ACs you suspect of trolling.
Have gnu, will travel.
> LOL. What makes you think you aren't being trolled by somebody posing as an ultraconservative?
Poe's Law
There is something even cooler about that, look at the 3D generated models of black holes merging, where the event horizon of each makes a "duck bill" shape that joins the two and then as they join contracting oblong rotating shape exists for a time.
So the event horizon can even assume complex shapes from our point of view.
First of all, I don't generally waste my time even trying to have a discussion on the matter with people who aren't interested in real science. The objection that we hadn't previously had any photographs of a black hole, even though it is an argument from ignorance, was nonetheless still built on a factual premise. That isn't the case anymore.
And to that end, I'd like to point out that most of the people who have presented the argument of being skeptical about the existence of black holes are not doing so because they are obstinate idiots who refuse to believe in something despite evidence... they are in my experience relatively open-minded individuals who simply don't understand the physics well enough to accept the existence of black holes as a given, and in such cases, a photograph is going to feel more real to these people than something that has only ever previously been presented as an artists rendition based on a theory that they don't actually understand.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've never quite understood the skepticism surrounding black holes.
After all, we know neutron stars exist - we have observed them for over 50 years. The physics and math that allow for black holes are the same as for neutron stars, so it would seem a foregone conclusion.
Reminds me of the idiots who say they accept variation and selection, but don't believe "evolution" is real!
That was my follow on question - the things are flying around bumping into each other and merging. So intermediate shapes are needed during the merger. I presume they oscillate like anything else would for a while after. At least I feel a little less ignorant than I was two days ago.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Armed with new google terms to put it, I found this, which is reasonably illuminating.
https://www.quora.com/In-a-bin...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
One aspect of all this that we geeks might find interesting is the recording systems developed for handling the huge amounts of data a high-bandwidth radio telescope spits out. MIT Haystack Observatory, NRAO and a company called Conduant have created storage packs for those times when there just isn't a level of RAID that can handle your data needs. Here's the latest (Mark 6) from Haystack's site:
https://www.haystack.mit.edu/t...
If I correctly understood and recall the way it was explained to me once, it's basically a box of cheap disks with a controller smart enough and fast enough to shove data to whatever drive can take it, and keep a journal of what was put where, so when all the drive packs from around the world are shipped back to Haystack for correlating, it can all be sorted out and put into the right order.
So... not only is there the whole "imagine what you could do with 5 petabytes of storage," there's the whole "imagine what you could do with storage that you can write to at a sustained rate of 16Gbps."
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
How much dirt is in a hole in the ground that's 1 meter deep and 2 meters in diameter?
I think I saw a headline - Woman shows us a black hole.
Yea, I went there.
They don't believe the bible is true. They believe what they want to believe and use the bible to justify it.
They couldn't believe it all as it contradicts itself, and more importantly, goes against everything they do. Love thy neighbour, do unto others all that stuff.
What doesn't make any sense is why the black bit is black. There should be glowing gas all around the "thing" and that includes between us and the black bit. I don't understand why this is never addressed.
"The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge."
Bullshit. If true, then there would be a big dark cool band right through the center of the image.
No one is answering the question of where is the light being emitted from matter *in front* of the black hole and the observer. The answer is that it would just come straight at us and we would see it.
Crickets?...
https://m.xkcd.com/2135/
"Interesting how God always seems to want exactly the same things you want!"
"Yet from another view, we would see that the event horizon is not a flat disk with a big hole in the middle (where an enormous black hole lies). 'It's a donut sort of thing—but not a frisbee,' said Lai.
"Still, we are viewing this black hole—and the event horizon around it—from an ideal angle. It's a bit like hovering above Earth and looking down onto the North Pole, said Bentz. This allows us to glimpse the ring around the rotating black hole, which scientists suspect is a great big sphere, like Earth.
"It's an invisible sphere surrounded by a donut of hot gas, if you will."
https://news.yahoo.com/apos-actually-going-cryptic-black-213745553.html
What doesn't make any sense is why the black bit is black. There should be glowing gas all around the "thing" and that includes between us and the black bit. I don't understand why this is never addressed.
According to the article, spacetime is warped so badly, all you can see is the halo from any angle, and the jets from the "polar" regions (which I'm guessing are pretty much anywhere, also relative to your perspective-wait...well just accept that the picture is pretty cool!: ) ).
So there is absolutely relativistic about this image. It is just a very large accretion disc, viewed from above. Got it.
Doesn't compute. The black hole can distort light coming from the sides, from behind, and light going away from the user could be bent back to head towards the user.
But light that starts off moving towards the user? That keeps going, and the black hole can't do anything about it.
> Doesn't compute
I strongly suspect that you haven't done any computations, and in fact have no clue what computations would be necessary to answer this question.
So why don't you stop talking out of your ass?
Nice ad hominem, dickhead.
I am a physicist, which is why I'm asking the question.
Light originating between us and the black hole will travel towards us and we will detect it. For photos originating very close to the black hole they may experience a red shift as they climb out of the gravity well, but that is a calculation I am happy to admit I haven't made.
The mainstream understanding of what this photo shows is disastrously skewed, and I blame the research team and the way it it's been reported. The one good thing is that their work is open access, so anyone can read it. I suggest you do.
It's not ad hominem, I didn't attack you for who you are or some irrelevant character trait to imply you're wrong.
I'm only implying that you appear to be clueless despite being "a physicist" (nice generality there). The answers to your pseudoskeptical questions can probably be found in whatever the team has published, but you just keep on flapping your jowls saying "it doesn't make sense!" Maybe it does if you do the work to understand it?
(Disclaimer: I'm not "a physicist" which is why I don't do armchair criticism, but you have no such excuse...)
I've read the paper and my conclusions is that the photo is being portrayed as something it is not.
There are no relativistic aspects to the image.
It is an image of a very large accretion disk, that is conveniently viewed from above.
There is no self-consistent math that claims Dark Matter or Dark Energy do not exist. The only math that does is in direct conflict with other well known measurements. There are some hypothesis that claim it doesn't exist, but no one in the past 100 years has made math that can explain every facet of the observations around this well documented phenomena.