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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?
is this a metaphor for our president?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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...
i.e. they don't exist only in two dimensions, as a flat 'disc'.
Therefore there could be no visible gas or particles around the periphery of a 'black hole' because they would have already been sucked into it, since they are on the edge of it...
Therefore the whole thing is a load of rubbish. A black hole would only visible when it obscures stars, gases and particles BEHIND it. This photo is therefore not real.
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".
There are still no evidences that black holes exist. This looks like a smudged photo of toilet seats, and no proof was given of authenticity of image. The hype in the lamestreme media over this faked picture tells me there is like to be a big liberal agenda behind it.
As always the only REAL truth to be found is in the Bible and these liberals should spend more time to be reading it than making up lies to push there agendas.
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.
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.
Have you ever been diagnosed as autism spectrum? You might want to look into it...
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.
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?
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.
It's a picture of the stuff around the black hole being occluded by the black hole's event horizon.
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.
[
Re-read the rebuttal until you understand it.
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?
http://goatse.ru/
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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
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
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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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.
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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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
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.
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.
" ... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Have gnu, will travel.
All my cats are black, you insensitive clod. You're looking at a blank monitor...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because high water vapour levels block submillimetre waves.
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.
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.
Certainly is amazing. I just hate the headline.
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...
LOL such weak sauce
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
"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/
"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
So there is absolutely relativistic about this image. It is just a very large accretion disc, viewed from above. Got it.