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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?
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'
It is artificially colored. The actual "color" of the disk is not in the visible spectrum
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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".
The Eye of Sauron. Confirmed by C|Net
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'
1. Uh, you DO realize Hugh Hefner died in 2017 right?
2. His last name is Hawking
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.
"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 was not "captured" but computer generated. this is no photo. radio telescopes don't take pictures, they record waves. Am I wrong?
True, and optical telescopes (mk 1 eyeball being the lowest technology example) just record em waves too. Most of the best cameras these days use computer chips to generate the image. So it seems like any other camera to me, just with a bit of a different lens and processing system.
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.
Um, even cameras record waves. The radio telescope is able to detect photons outside the human visual spectrum range, but they are still photons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
According to your logic, neither your phone nor digital cameras take pictures.
right. fair enough... just reading the press and social media it sounds like some guy was on his roof top and shot the thing...
i meant radio-telescopes does not make photos...
Forget it, he’s rolling.
still, photo use photons... this is a picture ok, but no photo. i may be wrong... thanks, for your enlightenment ;) !
Digital cameras record waves, and computer-generate an image from those waves.
Radio telescopes record waves, and computer-generate in image from those waves.
The only difference is the frequency of the photons captured by the detector.
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.
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This just becomes a game of definitions. I could take a picture, shift the visible light well into the UV spectrum, and to my mind, it's still a picture, just in the part of the spectrum human eyes can't detect. By, I suppose, the most restricted definition of a "picture", that is an image that, with reasonable accuracy, reproduces the spectra actually reflected or emitted in the real world object, it isn't a picture. But then, would a black and white photo be a picture, since it doesn't record a large amount of the spectral information in the original object, so it is essentially "modified".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
ok fair enough. still to me a photo is taken/captured and generated using an optical device... we are pin pricking here. it's just like, ine the medias it sounds like, searchers were having beers on a rooftop a shot the thing with their digital camera...
It's a picture that even includes stuff behind the black hole. Check out this video.
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
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
a picture ok. a photo? not so sure... an yeah ok this is great! fine! just wondering about the word photo being used in the media.
u just did
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.
Even the human eye just uses waves to change the stereochemical properties of some molecule (it turns 11-cis-Retinal into all-trans-Retinal, to be exact, which is the same molecule, but with a different bend in space). Depending on the protein connected to the Retinal (it's called an Opsine), you need different wavelengths for the effect to happen. Then the resulting receptor potential is added up with those of of the neighbouring cells, and about 200 cells send a summary signal via nerve fibers to the brain for further processing.
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
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.
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
If you had 6bn suns rammed in, yours would be irritated, too.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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 my phone had the resolution of these radio telescopes it would. However, my phone's resolution is much lower.
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.
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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So much humor potential in this story; so little time.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
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
Yes.
A "photo" as you are using the term is merely captured, computer processed waves in a chunk of spectrum we call "the visible spectrum".
This is actually a bunch of "photos" of not-visible spectrum waves combined and processed using VLIB to get a synthetic aperture size larger than any single "camera" aperture.
If this is not a picture, then neither is any picture produced by any camera in the world, and beyond that, nor do you see.
If you want to be less pedantic, then if this is not a picture, then neither is any HDR or panoramic picture you've ever looked at.
You're making distinctions that do not exist.
There is no difference between an x-ray photon, and a (let's call it) red photon, other than the energy of the photon.
They are both photons. They are both particles, and they are both waves.
X-ray photography against a plate, is that not a picture or is it?
An HDR image from your phone camera, is that not a picture, or is it?
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?
still, photo use photons... this is a picture ok, but no photo. i may be wrong... thanks, for your enlightenment ;) !
Radio waves are still electromagnetic radiation. The particles associated with radio waves are still photons.
Some of us understand that radio telescopes record (capture) radio waves, not visible light.
So? In terms of physics, the difference between radio waves and visible light is arbitrary - "visible light" is just the frequency/wavelength range that humans can see. The range of "visible light" is different for different animals. They're both electromagnetic radiation and they both behave the same way.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
If they used many radio telescopes across the world as a phase array, one should be aware that the imaging properties are very different from optical lenses; it's a bit like taking a big optical telescope mirror and painting most of the surface black except a few small specks. You get a good resolution for objects in front of the telescope, but you'll also image objects at different angles and you can't tell them apart.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Wait but earth is still flat right???
BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
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.
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.
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'
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.
I'd argue I have a profession... I mean it pays above 90th percentile, it's salaried, with all the fun bonuses and perks... I speak at big conferences...
What is the difference between a profession, and a mere job, anyway?
Other than that... You're right about everything. My sleep is shit. I survive off of stimulants. But it's not abnormal for my profession, even if it does suck.
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.
Then I take one of the many dozens of offers in my inbox...
I guess in that you're asking if I make money without employment, then no, I don't have a profession.
Also in that instance, I'm not quite sure who really does. Miners?
Man, everything we do and experience in the world has to do with EM waves. Pick up your coffee cup; that was an interaction mediated by waves and photons.