The First-Ever Image of a Black Hole

Discussion in 'Race, Religion, Science and Politics' started by OckyDub, Apr 10, 2019.

  1. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    [​IMG]

    Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Scientists have presented the first-ever image of a black hole.

    The image shows the shadow of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years away. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. It took a worldwide collaboration of telescopes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), in order to find it. Scientists released their results at a press conference today.

    “It’s an amazing result,” Harvard astronomer and EHT director Shep Doeleman told Gizmodo. “We just need to sit back and appreciate it for a while. The best part about it isn’t the questions and answers right away, but the fact that it opens up a new field of study.”

    Black holes have long served as a theoretical exercise. But astronomical observations in the past 60 years have increasingly demonstrated that there are objects in the Universe whose gravitational field is so intense that it warps spacetime such that light cannot escape beyond a point of no return, called the event horizon. Thanks to a world-side collaboration, is the closest image ever taken to the event horizon itself, near-direct evidence of the black hole’s existence.

    This is not really a “picture” of a black hole, and the shadow does not denote the black hole’s event horizon. Instead, you’re seeing the effects of gravity on the radio waves emitted from matter surrounding the black hole in a slightly larger region around the black hole’s event horizon. Gravity warps the shape of spacetime itself, deflecting some of the light in the region and generating an eerie circular shadow.

    But it’s a groundbreaking observation, and another important proof of the theory of gravity that physicists use as a guide to the universe, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

    The Event Horizon Telescope’s scientists captured this image thanks to the principle of very long baseline interferometry, or VLBI. The resolution of a telescope relies on two main properties: the diameter of the light-collecting region and the wavelength of the light. You can’t alter the second part, and there’s sort of a maximum sensible limit to how large a satellite dish you can build. Instead, scientists combine data from a lot of different pairs of telescopes, called baselines. Eight telescopes were involved in creating this image, from the South Pole to Chile to Spain to the United States.

    The telescope set out to image both the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, as well as that of M87. Today’s results present those from M87—an incredibly interesting object to study on its own, as it is the center of an active galactic nucleus, one that spews jets, and one that is the size of our entire solar system, explained Sera Markoff, astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam.

    We now know that a black hole, and not some other compact object, is responsible for generating these jets, Avery Broderick, associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute and physicist at the University of Waterloo, explained during the press conference.

    “Science fiction becomes science fact,” Broderick said.

    But it’s important to note that interferometry still requires some work from people to create the image. We only capture some of the data; the EHT scientists explain that it’s sort of like playing a song with only some of the notes. With some special data-processing programs, they’re able to figure out what they were looking at based on the data they received.

    Black holes as a theory are a consequence of trying to solve the equations of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity for a spherical, non-rotating system. However, it was the work of physicist David Ritz Finkelstein in 1958 that determined what black holes would look like in space: points of no return for light. We already had lots of indirect evidence of black holes’ existence—we’ve seen gravitational waves, predicted perfectly by mass turned into energy after the utterly inconceivable collision between a pair of black holes each a few dozen times the mass of the Sun. We’ve seen jets of particles spew forth from galactic centers that are far more energetic than those that come from collisions at our highest-energy physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider. Technically, the EHT data is indirect evidence as well, but it’s about as close to direct evidence as we’ve had thus far.

    It’s an amazing accomplishment. “The event horizon in black holes represent the limits of our knowledge,” Yale physicist Priyamvada Natarajan told Gizmodo.

    “Omfg,” Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics physicist Grant Tremblay told Gizmodo in a Twitter direct message. “They actually see a shadow. Impossible to overstate how extraordinary that is.”

    You might wonder where the image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, is. It’s a harder source to image, Doeleman explained.

    There’s a ton of science left to do, and several papers have already come from the EHT data. The image immediately proves several ideas from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But there are more questions—and we’ll keep you updated as the story unfolds.

    Said Tremblay: “The image marks the start of a new epoch.”

    https://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-photo-of-a-black-hole-1833923659
     
  2. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    :franko1::mjlol:

    This Black Hole Is a 'Massive' Disappointment

    Today, a team of scientists confirmed what we long suspected: black holes are a big old suck!

    When I first heard the news that astronomers would be releasing the first ever picture of a black hole, I—like many of you—was excited. What would we see? Mad beams shooting out lasers in all direction? A stream of doomed spaceships being pulled to their demise? Of course I understand that camera resolution over a distance of 500 million trillion kilometers may pose technical challenges, but these scientists build a network of telescopes the size of the entire earth. I did not necessarily expect to see this (at least not in such sharp detail)

    [​IMG]

    But I expected to see, at minimum, something like this

    [​IMG]

    And what did this team of “brilliant” scientists give us today, after all of that work of building telescopes across the world?

    [​IMG]

    Okay. What am I looking at here—a camera that you left in your backpack at night and the flash accidentally went off? A camera that a plumber put on a wire and stuck down your clogged drain? An image of what you see when the cop shines a flashlight in your eyes after you passed out drunk? Any of those I would believe. If you told me instead, “You are looking at a scientific marvel that should really blow your mind,” I would say: no I’m not. Maybe your mind is more easily blown that mine. That I would believe.

    Scientists tell us that a black hole sucks up all light and none can escape. So how the hell did they expect to take a picture of it? You need light for a picture.

    Who is the moron now? The American (and other) people who put their faith in “experts” who claimed they could deliver something not even Albert Einstein himself could. That is who.

    https://splinternews.com/this-black-hole-is-a-massive-disappointment-1833938671
     
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  3. Winston Smith

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    I’m assuming the above was Splinter’s attempt at “satire”. If not, that’s one lame motherfucker who needs to be punched in his pie hole by Buzz Aldrin.

    No wonder Gizmodo can’t sell off their sites...
     
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  4. Gxvision

    Gxvision Lurker

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    It's the event horizon. Not a spectacular picture but I am happy we can even gaze that far into our universe. Until we get star trek I won't be happy though. I want my food replicator and holo deck.
     
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  5. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    I have no idea what I was expecting but I can't lie and say I wasnt a bit disappointed and felt like... meh
     
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  6. Winston Smith

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    Well, you’re a science adjacent bruh, I’ll give you a pass lol. when You really think about the distances, lengths, etc. involved it’s a phenomenal achievement. It’s also software related. There’s a young lady who was responsible for the computer algorithm that made it all possible. So now I can also accuse Splinter of being sexist too lol.

    That’s why I hated Avengers Infinity War so much, the morons who wrote a concept of a single snap destroying half of all life in the universe (not even the galaxy) instantly, obviously had no clue about distances, scale, or the fact that the fastest thing we use to measure things, light, is still so slow it takes us about 2 million years to see light from the next galaxy over (Andromeda).

    So, 55 million year old recorded evidence of something that was heretofore theoretical to humans is still phenomenal.
     
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  7. Aejae

    Aejae Socially Awkward Aejae
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    I was disappointed to @OckyDub. I tend to watch CBS This Morning on a daily basis getting ready for work in the morning, and when I saw that picture I was unbothered.

    You'd think it'll be better than that, being that we're living in the age of high definition. If Spectrum forced me to go digital with my cable, then we the people should force these <whoever the powers may be who took this 1973 picture> to come with a better photo other than this. This looks like a circle of light taken with a blurred camera. A three year old can take a picture like this. I am... strongly disappointed, most importantly, by the hype the media is giving this.
     
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  8. Winston Smith

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    I love all y’all like CA squad like brothers, but I still have to “Tommy Lee” all y’all that thought an Earth-bound, radio-telescope-based image of an event trillions of miles away that took place 55 million years ago was going to look like an iPhone selfie on Miami Beach...

    [​IMG]

    lmao

    Copies of “Cosmos”—-the original Carl Sagan work, not the shitty Neil DeGrasse Tyson version—-will be available in the lobby...

     
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  9. Omega Level

    Omega Level DRACARYS
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    Its heavy as fuck on science-y, techy, nerdy, lingo - mumbo jumbo, but all in all Im excited to learn more and for them to further explore what the fuck in out there.

    The universe has always fascinated me by simply going outside, looking up and wondering, "what the entire fuck is all that up there"? I mean of course we know in terms of stars, planets, etc, but I can imagine is so much shit out there that we can only imagine or perhaps cant even imagine.

    I bet there are so many worlds and planets of living life forms doing their own things, we cant even count how many. I bet its a planet out there with dinosaur like things that is beginning similar to the way we started.
     
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  10. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    upload_2019-4-14_13-55-56.png
     
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