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posted by takyon on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the donut-of-doom dept.

Submitted via IRC for boru

Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein's general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory.

[...] This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:

Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.

Also at Ars Technica.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:05PM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:05PM (#827989) Homepage
    It's not a case of "2 years later [what they showed] resembles the picture reconstructed from the collected data". There was no "picture reconstructed from the collected data" until the images in the papers just published. Your assertion of there being a "coincidence" is you simply seeing or hearing double - put down the bottle!

    Depending on the exact model used for the reconstruction there are very slight differences, but they all show the same general form - an asymmetric donut. The only reasonable conclusion is that they detected something that looks donutty.

    A mathematical model dating back to the 60s predicts exactly such a form from a high-rotational-momentum black hole. Why do you not think this image supports that model? The reconstructions produce donuts even if you don't tell them to expect a donut. As I said elsewhere - if you ask the reconstruction to generate a binary pair, it will find you a donut.

    I genuinely can't understand what it is that you can't understand, or at least why you can't understand it, sorry. Rewatch the vid.
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:01PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:01PM (#828305) Journal

    There was no "picture reconstructed from the collected data" until the images in the papers just published.

    That TeD talk youtube? Is "Published on Dec 7, 2016"

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:43PM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:43PM (#828341) Homepage
      The description of the techniques to be used on real data, and how they worked on simulated data, were indeed in the Ted talk in 2016.

      Beleive it or not, they indeed did know what processing they would do with the data before capturing petabytes of it on thousands of hard disks. It's almost as if they are intelligent scientists who can do things like predict and plan and, shock horror - think!

      You, however, have quite frankly started to become really tedious and annoying with ever more dumb questions that have obvious or already-supplied answers.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:49PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:49PM (#828349) Journal

        Ok, will leave it here, then.

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