Author Topic: Black hole photos  (Read 4842 times)

Black hole photos
« on: 08 April, 2019, 08:55:45 pm »
Could not find this elsewhere.  Photos are set to be released on Weds. What do people expect to see?

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
Get a bicycle. You will never regret it, if you live- Mark Twain

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #1 on: 08 April, 2019, 09:29:33 pm »
Blackness. With artificial colouring.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #2 on: 08 April, 2019, 09:48:16 pm »
Quote
Holly: Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?

Rimmer: But five of them? How can you manage to miss five black holes?

Holly: It's always the way, innit? You hang around for three million years in deep space and there hasn't been one, then all of a sudden five turn up at once.

Pot noodles on standby...

ian

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #3 on: 09 April, 2019, 03:25:21 pm »
A rather hot event horizon, I'd imagine. Get out the marshmallows.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #4 on: 09 April, 2019, 03:29:40 pm »
A rather hot event horizon, I'd imagine. Get out the marshmallows.

TBH, I prefer mine merely toasted - the x-ray irradiation spoils the taste somewhat.
"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Freidrich Neitzsche

ian

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #5 on: 09 April, 2019, 03:48:21 pm »
X-rays. Pah. I prefer my marshmallows briefly toasted with a burst of ultra-high energy hard gamma rays. Serve with a hint of neutrino.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #6 on: 09 April, 2019, 08:22:55 pm »
Nothing from the Whitehouse as yet concerning biggest bestest ............
Get a bicycle. You will never regret it, if you live- Mark Twain

Phil W

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #7 on: 09 April, 2019, 08:39:33 pm »
Nothing from the Whitehouse as yet concerning biggest bestest ............

Busy filming the fast show.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #8 on: 09 April, 2019, 08:48:12 pm »
Nothing from the Whitehouse as yet concerning biggest bestest ............

Trump is a political black hole - people caught inside his event horizon suffer the complete destruction of integrity1 and reputation2, while in a reverse of how most black holes work, no data is able to penetrate.


1 Assuming that they had any to begin with.

2 In accordance with the Rick Wilson Rule: Everything Trump Touches Dies (ETTD).
"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Freidrich Neitzsche

Phil W

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #9 on: 09 April, 2019, 09:03:37 pm »
First photos have just come in


Pedal Castro

  • so talented I can run with scissors - ouch!
    • Two beers or not two beers...
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #10 on: 10 April, 2019, 06:31:55 am »
That looks like an artist's impression.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #11 on: 10 April, 2019, 07:31:46 am »
Photos at 14:00 our time, today

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #12 on: 10 April, 2019, 11:43:21 am »
BBC Four are running a programme this evening at 9pm about the journey to capture these pictures, "How to See a Black Hole: The Universe’s Greatest Mystery"

Eddington: 133 miles    Max square: 43x43

essexian

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #13 on: 10 April, 2019, 11:58:16 am »
I was going to post a picture of Boston Lincs but thought I might get some ggggrrrrrssss from the locals!

Looking forward to the photos and wonder whether they will answer some fundamental questions such as are Black Holes hairy like Steven Hawking suggested.


andytheflyer

  • Andytheex-flyer.....
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #14 on: 10 April, 2019, 12:41:54 pm »
I was going to post a picture of Boston Lincs but thought I might get some ggggrrrrrssss from the locals!

Looking forward to the photos and wonder whether they will answer some fundamental questions such as are Black Holes hairy like Steven Hawking suggested.
As a Bostonian (but a Cestrian fo the last 40 years) why Boston?  And I do agree with you, when I went to the Grammar School it was a fairly well-to-do market town, but over the last 20 years or so on visits to my late parents it really deteriorated.  It's a bit of a dump now, especially along Spilsby Road.

My brother, who's a farm manager out in the Fens is shortly to retire, so he has to buy a house for the first time, and whilst he's well-off financially, he can't find anything in the town that he'd want to buy.  Sad really, it used to be a lovely little Fenland town.

And it's not the migrant community, it's just a lack of investment and a loss of urban pride.  And I don't know why; my Cheshire/Marches village home for the last 30 years hasn't gone the same way.  Must be a lack of cash in the arable farming industry driven to the bottom by the buying power of the supermarkets, squeezing margins.

essexian

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #15 on: 10 April, 2019, 01:03:25 pm »
Why Boston....well first is with regards to work so I regret I cannot say more and secondly, it was a dig at their anti EU stance. Sorry, it was a poor attempt at humour.

I have actually been there once....well I drove through the place on the way to somewhere else. For the life of me I can't remember where I was going!

How about I post a picture of Hadley Telford instead.... Surely no-one here lives in Hadley.....

andytheflyer

  • Andytheex-flyer.....
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #16 on: 10 April, 2019, 01:48:14 pm »
Ha ha!  I can agree with you about bits of Telford!

Surprised you can't remember where you were going when you passed through Boston  ;D.    You don't go to Boston unless you are absolutely determined to go somewhere in that part of the country.  It's off all the beaten tracks.  Even Skeggy.

essexian

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #17 on: 10 April, 2019, 02:01:19 pm »
It may have been Skeggy.... I've been twice on business. Quite nice, if flat, cycling around there.

The presentation is now on Youtube if anyone is interested in watching it live.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #18 on: 10 April, 2019, 02:22:59 pm »
"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Freidrich Neitzsche

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #19 on: 10 April, 2019, 03:58:16 pm »
"measures 40 billion km across".  Our Sun's diameter ~1.4 million km.    :o
Cycle and recycle.   SS Wilson

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #20 on: 10 April, 2019, 05:09:42 pm »
The strange thing is that its density could be less than that of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole

(Wiki were quick off the mark.)
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #21 on: 10 April, 2019, 06:11:38 pm »
Veritasium has good video explaining what the image shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo

This video was made before the image was revealed so it also demonstrates the accuracy of the predictions

Phil W

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #22 on: 10 April, 2019, 06:34:59 pm »
The strange thing is that its density could be less than that of water

Volume is defined by event horizon radius so much within that volume will be empty space.  Only at the centre is it super dense.  So for super massive black holes the event horizon will be a super massive way out from the centre, super massive volume compared to amount of mass.

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #23 on: 10 April, 2019, 11:53:43 pm »
Some good stuff from astrophysicist and "connoisseur of cosmic catastrophes" Katie Mack:

Quote
There's a brief write-up at @PhysicsWorld here: https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unveiled-by-astronomers-in-landmark-discovery/ … with more images. Here's the image seen (left) compared with a simulation (middle) and the simulation blurred to the expected resolution of the telescope (right). (Image via Akiyama et al & ApJL)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y5h1lXoAEovA7.jpg
https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/1115971220762189824

Quote
If you want to dig into why the image looks the way it does, and what we're actually seeing, I have some suggested links for you! See next couple tweets.

Here's a page talking about creating simulated #BlackHole images: http://rantonels.github.io/starless/  Note: these renderings don't include the effect that makes the part of the disk moving toward us brighter (neither did the film Interstellar -- more about that here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03808.pdf )

Here's a paper talking about the history of black hole images, with a detailed discussion of what you should expect for the "shadow" image we've just seen. Check Fig 12, with renderings of shadows for disks at different angles https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11196.pdf

Here's a technical paper from the @ehtelescope team talking about why the ring looks the way it does. Figure 1 showing the comparison between the image and the simulations is especially cool! https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0f43
https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/1116024686893305861



Minor edit for speelung miss-toke.
"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." ~ Freidrich Neitzsche

Re: Black hole photos
« Reply #24 on: 11 April, 2019, 02:00:35 am »
The strange thing is that its density could be less than that of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole

(Wiki were quick off the mark.)



supermassive polo mint...?

cheers