Scientific breakthrough - photo of a black hole
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Topic: Scientific breakthrough - photo of a black hole
Posted By: BaldFriede
Subject: Scientific breakthrough - photo of a black hole
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 02:27
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No, this is not a belated April fool's joke; scientists really managed to take a photo of a black hole. And here it is:  As you can guess it was extremely hard to get; Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University and the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who directed the project
behind the black hole image, said: "... it’s the equivalent of seeing an orange on the moon or
being able to read the newspaper in Los Angeles while you’re sitting in
New York City”. The article also mentions that
the image looks eerily like the eye of Sauron from "Lord of the Rings",
which is a sentiment I share. And here a link to the whole article: https://www.zmescience.com/space/black-hole-picture-0432/" rel="nofollow - https://www.zmescience.com/space/black-hole-picture-0432/
-------------  BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue. |
Replies:
Posted By: Atavachron
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 03:46
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You can actually see the light bending inward creating a huge lifesaver type of shape around the circumference. Eerie and amazing, though troubling that it's close enough to photograph. On the other hand I'm pretty sure that's Sheperd Doeleman's porch light. ------------- "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy |
Posted By: Sean Trane
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 05:03
national newspaper headlines (I'll let you translate for yourself )  newspaper headlines |
Posted By: BaldFriede
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 05:16
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The amazing and fascinating thing is that to photograph it the
whole earth had to be turned into a telescope. Let me quote from the
article: "In order to image an object as small as Sagittarius A*, you need a
really big telescope. In this case, the researchers turned the whole
planet into a huge telescope by combining data from eight radio
telescopes located all around the world. Using a technique called Very
Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, the instruments of all these
observatories located thousands of miles from one another were linked to
form a “virtual telescope”, whose resolving power is as big as the
space between the disparate dishes." ------------- BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue. |
Posted By: BaldFriede
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 05:37
The black hole in this caricature would not have reminded me of the brain of Donald Trump but of his sphincter, though some might ask: "Où est la différence"? ------------- BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue. |
Sean Trane wrote:
newspaper headlinesPosted By: Sean Trane
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 05:52
That's what the woman in attendance is meaning; but not daring to say it
 |
Posted By: progaardvark
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 07:14
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And here's the person behind the algorithm that made the picture possible, 29-year-old computer scientist Katie Bouman: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902" rel="nofollow - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902 Other sources say that all of the telescopes involved in this amassed 5 petabytes of data. That's a lot of disc space.
------------- ---------- i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
Posted By: siLLy puPPy
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 07:33
 -------------  https://rateyourmusic.com/~siLLy_puPPy |
Posted By: AZF
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 08:05
| Spare a thought for those radios that played Black Hole Sun and stuff by Muse instead of Rush's Cygnus XI! |
Posted By: BaldFriede
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 08:20
It is about thirty thousand times the space on the hard disk of our computer (1.6 terabyte). And there are many many albums and movies on our hard disk. We could never fill that much disk space in any meaningful way in our entire combined lives (meaning the members of our current household, which consists of my wife Jean, our daughters Alice and Dorothy, Jean's sister Bea and me, or in other words the members of our current band project Mother Gaia).
------------- BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue. |
Posted By: Snicolette
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 09:52
Just an amazing thing to have done. And brava to the student who helped make it possible.  ------------- "Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp |
Posted By: Vompatti
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 11:50
| Interesting how they went for that artsy blur effect in the published photo. What was in the original that they didn't want us to see? |
Posted By: Atavachron
Date Posted: April 11 2019 at 20:00
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^ Jim Croce ? I did see a shot with better resolution that came out today ~ ------------- "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy |
Posted By: Triceratopsoil
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 12:15
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A team a 30+ worked on the algorithm... not that BBC cares |
Posted By: Vompatti
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 12:33
| she's rly cute though |
Posted By: Snicolette
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 13:44
They were afraid we would see this:  ------------- "Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp |
Posted By: Snicolette
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 13:45
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Seriously, though, it is truly amazing. And great teamwork with scientists all over the world.
------------- "Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp |
Posted By: Atavachron
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 16:39
Because guitar picks often disappear never to be seen again, right ? ------------- "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy |
Posted By: Snicolette
Date Posted: April 12 2019 at 16:50
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They have a way of showing up in small masses in hidden places, at least at my house. ------------- "Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp |
Posted By: 2dogs
Date Posted: April 14 2019 at 22:47
I watched a fascinating hour long TV programme about this. The team haven’t yet imaged the Sagittarius A* black hole at the centre of our galaxy, this one is in the galaxy M87 55 million light years away. The technical challenges were ridiculous as they had to record the radio signals from all these telescopes to hard drives then combine the data that had been emitted from the source at exactly the same instant - to a million millionth of a second using a very expensive atomic clock accurate to one second in ten million years. But the signals from those instants arrived at each site at different times due to them being at different places on the Earth and the locations of those places needed to be known extremely accurately to work those times out - taking into account the rotation of the Earth, movement of the ice shelf under the Antarctic telescope, continental drift of Hawaii and even the moving bulge in the Earth created by the pull of the Moon. Even then the data needed further processing to interpolate the image from what were effectively a few separated pixels rather than one big camera  .------------- "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette |
Posted By: Atavachron
Date Posted: April 14 2019 at 22:58
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Accurate to one second in ten million years? A watchmaker's dream. ------------- "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy |
Posted By: 2dogs
Date Posted: April 15 2019 at 07:03
One of the scientists did say though that they weren't going to wait 10 million years to test it .------------- "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette |
Posted By: siLLy puPPy
Date Posted: April 15 2019 at 07:08
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------------- https://rateyourmusic.com/~siLLy_puPPy |
Posted By: moshkito
Date Posted: April 15 2019 at 08:29
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Hi, Kinda strange for me to see these images ... because the physics behind it would suggest that if you can see it, you ARE under its influence, and before you can write it down and tell your friend, it would have already swallowed you up! Thus, if seeing is believing, then it's over! ------------- Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told! www.pedrosena.com |
Posted By: siLLy puPPy
Date Posted: April 15 2019 at 08:38
The thing is that you probably couldn't see it. These images are compiled from using transpectral analyses. In other words, compilers of these images use wavelengths of energy far beyond the miniscule spectrum of visible light. What you say might be true if you were actually near it (as far as we know, much of science is theoretical) but imagery can be obtained by energetic differentials that paint a picture. ------------- https://rateyourmusic.com/~siLLy_puPPy |
Posted By: 2dogs
Date Posted: April 15 2019 at 11:30
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^ Oh you can't see it - that's why it's called a black hole. The Human League can explain it - sort of . ------------- "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette |
Posted By: Archisorcerus
Date Posted: July 22 2022 at 07:21
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Here's a (relatively) recent article about black holes. Really good and interesting. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029/" rel="nofollow - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029/ |
Posted By: wiz_d_kidd
Date Posted: July 22 2022 at 10:13
Well, now they have. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, know as Sagattarius A*, or Sag A Star for short, has been imaged. https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy" rel="nofollow - https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy  |