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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:
- Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper II: Array and Instrumentation
- Paper III: Data processing and Calibration
- Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
- Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
- Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
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.
Related Stories
For the first time ever, Physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have captured an image of a type of strong quantum entanglement referred to as Bell entanglement.
This is what it looks like
The particular type of entanglement investigated in the experiment, Bell entanglement, is named after John Stewart Bell, the author of Bell's Theorem which rules out local hidden variables as a viable explanation of quantum mechanics.
Bell formalised the concept of quantum entanglement and was a notable critic of Einstein's principle of local realism – both the assumption that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, and the assumption that a particle must objectively have a pre-existing value in order to be measured.
The researchers results (full article) were published last week in the journal Science Advances.
The image we've managed to capture is an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature, seen for the very first time in the form of an image," said Dr Paul-Antoine Moreau of the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy, and lead author of the paper.
"It's an exciting result which could be used to advance the emerging field of quantum computing and lead to new types of imaging."
Scientists are certainly burning the Type Ia Supernova (*) at both ends lately - from imaging black holes to imaging quantum entanglement.
Event Horizon Telescope captures new view of black hole in polarized light:
Two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made headlines with its announcement of the first direct image of a black hole. Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year. Now the EHT collaboration is back with another groundbreaking result: a new image of the same black hole, this time showing how it looks in polarized light. The ability to measure that polarization for the first time—a signature of magnetic fields at the black hole's edge—is expected to yield fresh insight into how black holes gobble up matter and emit powerful jets from their cores. The new findings were described in three papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This work is a major milestone: the polarization of light carries information that allows us to better understand the physics behind the image we saw in April 2019, which was not possible before," said co-author Iván Martí-Vidal, coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and a researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain. "Unveiling this new polarized-light image required years of work due to the complex techniques involved in obtaining and analyzing the data."
[...] In much the same way that polarized sunglasses reduce glare from bright surfaces, the polarized light around a black hole provides a sharper view of the region around it. In this case, the polarization of light isn't due to special filters (like the lenses in sunglasses) but the presence of magnetic fields in the hot region of space surrounding the black hole. That polarization enables astronomers to map the magnetic field lines at the inner edge and to study the interaction between matter flowing in and being blown outward.
"The observations suggest that the magnetic fields at the black hole's edge are strong enough to push back on the hot gas and help it resist gravity's pull. Only the gas that slips through the field can spiral inwards to the event horizon," said co-author Jason Dexter of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is also coordinator of the EHT Theory Working Group. That means that only theoretical models that incorporate the feature of a strongly magnetized gas accurately describe what the EHT collaboration has observed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:05PM (16 children)
What is the importance of this? (Not being cynical or sarcastic, I'm being earnest here.)
Last I heard a few years ago, black holes were still theoretical. So does this prove they exist? Are there other scientific or other purposes to this photo? Is it "proof we can work together across the world to accomplish astronomy?" Is it "just a cool picture?"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:16PM (1 child)
It took 6 months of supercomputer time for them to generate these images from their data and pictures they fed in of what they thought a black hole should look like.
Also, the "black" region could be brighter than the surface of the sun for all we know. Think about how sunspots look black but are actually very bright.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:21AM
They apparently chopped up pictures of people from facebook and plugged it in to their algorithm to get this picture of a black hole.
See here starting at ~6:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:31PM (5 children)
Nobody's ever *directly* observed a black hole. We've indirectly inferred their existence.
This is like spotting the first strand of DNA, the first atom, or the first quark.... just at the other end of the scale.
We've always "known" black holes exist, and we've always thought we'd be able to see something coming "from" them (they don't suck *everything* in). Now we know of one instance, for certain, that we can observe in a way that means it must be a black hole.
Don't forget, in the 1920's, when Einstein and others posited them, there wasn't even a word for "black hole". That didn't come about until the 60's. They've been variously unthought-of, then largely theoretical for much of the last century, and now we have seen one first-hand with an instrument that's actually seeing the *hole*, not just something being sucked into one.
It's the difference between the Rutherford slit experiment and actually building an electron microscope, in effect.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:53PM
>.... just at the other end of the scale
Basically, the first your mom.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:22PM (3 children)
No, we haven't always known that Black Holes exist. We've *suspected* that they exist since Laplace (though that naturally wasn't an Einsteinian black hole, but merely a star that was heavy enough to pull light into orbit around it). Even now there could be arguments. This is consistent with a Black Hole, but we can't prove that it's one in other than the Laplacian sense. It could be a star made out of quarkium (i.e., one heavy enough that neutrons aren't able to withstand further compression, so they are squeezed tightly enough to dissolve freeing their component quarks).
P.S.: This is a GUESS on my part. Perhaps they have actually measured a Schwarzschild horizon. But I doubt it. I think they've just detected something consistent with what current theory says a black hole would show where other analysis says something heavy enough to be a black hole is. So it's important to astrophysicists, astronomers, etc. but doesn't really test any current theories. (Well, it counts as confirmation, but only in the sense that it agrees with what was already generally accepted as true.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:40PM (1 child)
"known" was in quotes for a reason.
Pretty much, I believe the entire depiction of the black hole confirms exactly with the Schwarzchild parameters we would expect. There's a video on Youtube pre- the revelation which shows what they'd expect and the radii involved. The press are excited because it's a photo. The scientists are excited because it matches standard predictions and contains multiple things they can measure against the Schwarzchild radius. If they match (which is literally a two-second pixel measure), then an awful lot of science is confirmed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&disable_polymer=true [youtube.com]
For a simple image analysis it "confirms" an awful lot that was "known" in a single glance, as well as provides metrics that can *prove* (without quotes) that it matches expected science.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:35PM
Yes. It certainly narrows the plausible alternatives. And it (so far) matches expected predictions. But there's a whole lot of assumptions involved in interpreting the data, and the resolution isn't that good. (Well, it would have been foolish to expect better, but still, ...)
So, AFAIKT, it's consistent with a black hole. But I think that there are still alternatives. (OTOH, I'm no specialist in that area. But I *do* know how PR types oversimplify science reporting, and turn estimates of probability into statements of certainty. And this applies to flacks working for NASA nearly as much as to anyone else. [Well, there are some I don't trust that much. The "oversimplifiers" are, I think, trying to avoid confusing or boring their audience.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @02:21PM
The concerns you raise apply to the entirety of astronomy. We can't "prove" that any of the stuff we see in skies outside our solar system are what we think they are for the simple fact that we cannot get up close and touch them. But we have very nice tested models that predict they exist and predict what we observe, so we now say we've "seen" one in the same sense that we know interstellar gas clouds exist and star formation exists etc. etc. You can likewise say the same thing in the other direction. We haven't really proven atoms exist, or quarks, or whatever. But we have high confidence in the existence of those things by virtue of the existence of the screen you are using to read this; that was designed using the same models that say those things "exist".
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:38PM (4 children)
Super interesting to see an actual picture of a black-hole.
Can the picture tell us something new, that, we didn't know about black-holes ? What, if any, are the fundamental differences between our theoretical constructs and the actual picture ? Can the picture be used to either reaffirm Einstein's Theories or disprove them ? and, my guess, the most important question of all: Can black-holes be used for inter-dimensional or time travel ?
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:42PM (2 children)
It isn't a picture, its a heatmap.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:14PM (1 child)
Why do you say that? Everything I see says it's a low-energy microwave (1.3mm) spectrum image, not a data visualization diagram.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:40PM
It is the result of passing a bunch of messy data through an elaborate processing pipeline:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57 [iop.org]
Eg, here are four different images they generated:
https://cdn.iopscience.com/images/2041-8205/875/1/L4/Full/apjlab0e85f4_lr.jpg [iopscience.com]
Here she explains they even plug in images of what a black hole "should look like" as part of generating the image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:54PM
Here's the whole press conference, saw it live, but you obviously haven't seen it. It's good to watch it, you'll get some answers from it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnJi0Jy692w [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by tizan on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:38PM (2 children)
A black hole has an event horizon (hence the name of the radio array used to image this).
We know for decades now that there is something massive and compact at the centre of galaxies ... And the only thing that can be that massive and compact can be black holes...where nothing can escape once they cross the event horizon. There are other theries out there (e.g MOND) that try to explain the mass and motion of stars in galaxies...Black holes is the only one that has withstood all observations so far.
This is the first observation at a resolution where you can distinguish the event horizon.
Does that make sense now why this is kind of very important ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:50PM
I think you are confusing black holes and "dark matter".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:56PM
>And the only thing that can be that massive and compact can be black holes
Assuming of course, that our known-flawed laws of physics are accurate.
It would be more accurate to say that we don't currently know of any forces strong enough to keep something sufficiently massive from collapsing into a singularity once sufficient angular momentum has been dissipated, assuming General Relativity is correct.
But we would be deep into extreme high energy QM, far beyond what we have actually been able to explore, before an event horizon was formed. There's also a proposed variation of GR that treats gravitational field energy the same way as all other energy fields, in terms of the energy field producing it's own gravitational pull, which renders black holes impossible due to the "pullback" of the gravity from the incredibly energy-dense gravitational field around an ultradense not-quite-a-black-hole. Einstein dismissed the idea as double-counting the effect of the central mass, but there's currently no evidence either way, unless this new photo provides it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:20PM (1 child)
I hope we can avoid any hymen jokes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:42PM
No, we'll just make do with the remarkable resemblance [wikipedia.org] to capricor
anus.(Score: 3, Funny) by WizardFusion on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:26PM (2 children)
They need to give that image to CSI.
Those guys can sharpen up the image really easily, just like on the telly.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:06PM
Enhance... enhance... enhance...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:29AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:26PM (4 children)
https://xkcd.com/2135/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:43PM (2 children)
http://goatse.ru/ [goatse.ru]
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:06PM (1 child)
How is this off topic?!
This /is/ the topic!
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 11 2019, @11:16AM
The Goatse guy is probably one of the most *recognizable* Internet celebrities.
I wonder why he's not posting on Instagram and playing at being an "influencer," like most Internet shills^W celebs?
Perhaps he's really shy?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:47PM
goatse.ru
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:36PM
NASA lies because in my book it says the north meets up with the south that's the end for America.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @09:54PM (1 child)
They say to never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.
Or in this case, a literal airplane filled with hard drives...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @02:08PM
Isn't the "they" in this case Andy Tannenbaum?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:36PM (38 children)
Clearly photoshoped. I mean, look, the shadows are out of whack.
Is there any reason we are presented with a doughnut section in a black hole? Like, were we so luck that all the heat was generated on a plane that happens to be orthogonal with the observation direction? Little or no heat at all generated between the black hole and us?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:06AM (21 children)
All we know is that the "donut" is much brighter than what is in the middle, not that the center is actually black.
Same as sunspots:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/4/why-do-sunspots-appear-dark [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:59AM (20 children)
It's still dubious that the doughnut has an almost perfect circle [iop.org] in the middle
M87 [wikipedia.org]
A stellar velocity map [wikipedia.org] of the galaxy suggest the M87 galaxy is rotating in a plane not exactly orthogonal on the direction we observe it.
Even more, Hubble detected a relativistic colimated jet [wikipedia.org] in M87 [wikipedia.org], suggesting the rotation axis of the M87 black hole is at an angle with the M87-Earth direction. Here's another image [wikipedia.org] generated from cm-wavelength radio emission.
If the donut shape we are observing is caused by an accretion disk, the central hole should appear elliptical.
Unless we just observed a transient phase and we were that lucky to look at the right moment (given the distance and the magnitude of the entire galaxy, what are the chances?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:35AM
Interesting points. You should ask on stack exchange or somewhere and see what response you get.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:17AM (16 children)
The black hole distorts the spacetime around it (well, in some sense the black hole is the distortion), therefore what you see is not quite what you would expect from Euclidean geometry.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:42AM (15 children)
No matter how the spacetime is distorted near the blackhole, I find it hard to believe the circular hole in the centre.
Unless you can explain how there's little to no emission from the whole side of the event horizon facing us and intense emission on the entire circumference, your statement may hold true but it's unconvincing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:38AM (14 children)
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, @10:59AM (13 children)
"E pur si muove" and "πάντα ῥεῖ"
And it just happens to spin around an axis that's oriented straight to the Solar system, for the benefit of human astronomers.
The same astronomers which observed a polar relativistic jet going on an angle and a distribution of star orbit velocities in which one side is speeding towards and the other side speeding away from Earth (heck of a misalignment between the angular momentum of the black hole gobbling those stars and the gobbled stars).
I mean... that's hell of a luck for the astronomers, don't you think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @11:49AM (1 child)
what would be really cool is if no matter (no pun intended) from where or which angle you observe and take a picture of a blackhole it ALWAYS looks like a ring O_o
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:34PM
If you ever look down that relativistic polar jet close enough, try to use a single eye.
That way, you may keep the other eye to look later into a laser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:31PM (10 children)
Nope, not at all. Firstly, where did you get that "fact" from? Noone's stated it, or anything like it, so I can only imagine it's come out of some other dark hole.
One pointing towards us would be firing a high energy beam of x rays right at us. And we know it isn't as we can see that high energy beam of X rays illuminating some path off elsewhere in space, and you should know that as it was one of Hubble's most lauded photos when it was captured in high resolution.
Additionally, according to the simulations of the mathematical models, one viewed aslant would look that way too. That's why the astronomers are calling this darkness the "shadow", rather than anything else. It's an indirect effect of the actual thing there, not the thing itself. The thing itself is invisible. As is the event horizon surrounding it. And not just invisible - so perturbing of space-time that it doesn't let anything, anywhere, appear to be from the same direction as it. And because this is actual space-time being perturbed, you can even claim it is not even "behind" any more - it's "behind and to the side", as space has been bent to the side, there literally is no "behind".
It's so perturbing of space-time that it can even make some hot bright thing in front of it, and below it from the viewer's perspective, appear as if that hot bright thing is behind it and above it (simple - the light flies away from the viewer, grazes near the event horizon, and in so doing gets a gravitational slingshot back towards the viewer). That's why the mathematical model simulation images contain loads and loads of messily superimposed circular arcs - you're allowed to loop around many times before escaping - and no orbits are stable, even for light beams.
GR and black holes in particular are weird, it's fine to not understand them, but that doesn't mean it's fine to dismiss the scientists who are able to make predictive statements before experimentation and then see those statements come true to the satisfaction of many other competing scientists.
Unless you think it's all a conspiracy, and there's just a monkey with a gold spray-can locked away in some Cambridge basement. From some of the "artist's impressions" I've seen on NASA press releases, sometimes I think that might be the case...
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, @09:58PM (9 children)
From the fact that the central hole looks almost perfectly circular.
Suppose that the hole would be rotating along an axis perfectly orthogonal on the observation direction. Would you still see the black perfect circle in the middle? If so, why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:38PM (8 children)
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, @10:47PM (7 children)
And if the accretion disk(/rotation axis) is at an angle with the observation direction, wouldn't there be some of the accretion disks visible above the "mess in the middle"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @11:56PM (6 children)
"the accretion disk on the "far" side that has been bent into view to that appears to be above..."
you respond:
"wouldn't there be some of the accretion disks visible above"
OK, there's a single letter typo, but really, you're taking the fucking piss now, you really are.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @12:35AM
Ok, mate, that's my last message on the topic.
Look at the Saturn's rings, you see them going in front of the circle that is the planet itself.
Now, go back to the black hole and, no matter from which side of the black hole (far or near) the light from the accretion disk come from, I would expect to see at least a band of light crossing that perfect circle. Yeah, Ok, maybe that band is not uniform in light intensity, but to my mind it should be something
In extreme, if the accretion disc is thick enough, I'd expect it to obscure a part of the horizon circle and transform its image into a distorted ellipse.
So far, the best explanation I got is this [soylentnews.org], positing that one won't see the accretion disc shape, but it's light after being scrambled by grav lensing and (maybe) frame drag, and that scrambled light will mostly coming from the circumference (i.e. the light coming straight from the accretion disc itself is weaker and swamped by the light that escapes the 'scrambling').
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @06:54AM (4 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GVbuddri8 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:32AM (3 children)
The thing where I was wrong was about those oblique angles, and apparently you can see "through" where the event horizon is. My thinking was that any light path from my eye directly to the direction of event horizon would have no way of not going into the event horizon, and thus disappearing. However, the concepts of "directly to", "the direction", and "going into" stop meaning quite what you'd normally expect when space and time (this might be a time issue I've not considered) are so distorted. Even "where the event horizon is" begins to lose its meaning, as it's somewhat relative.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 12 2019, @07:46AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 12 2019, @08:02AM (1 child)
It was the grav lensing that I was missing from the picture, which is first degree approx of why the accretion disc will show very weakly represented in the number of pixels on the screen and pushed away from the 'face' of the black hole.
(the bright side of our whole kerkuffle: pays to be stubbornly wrong on purpose in the search of a better answer. Sometimes, at least. Apologies for annoying you)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday April 13 2019, @08:24AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
From my understanding from one of the many articles related to these observations, with a black hole you expect to see the accretion disc "head on" no matter what direction you look at it from, due to the intense gravitational lensing it causes. We are talking about an area of space so intensely warped that light near the inner edge of the accretion disk will actually orbit around the black hole indefinitely.
In addition, we expect a uniform disc to appear very asymmetric, as it is orbiting at relativistic speeds, with half of it moving away from us (relative to the optical path), so that its emissions appear less energetic (red-shifted) from our perspective, while half moves towards us so the emissions appear more energetic (blue-shifted).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:16PM
Yeap, I forgot about them, thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:15AM (15 children)
Look at ~6:50 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU [youtube.com]
They generated a crapload of images from their noisy data and filtered out all the ones that didn't look like what they expected.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:13AM (4 children)
(Score: 2, Disagree) by c0lo on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:19AM
They may be valuable, but only by shear luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @02:54AM (1 child)
Yeah, the math is more complicated than my 8th grade education, so it's obviously fake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:51AM
fake = "made up by math"
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @07:47AM
Not only did they ask "if this thing is a Kerr black hole, what does it look like?", getting the answer "Kinda donut shaped, like a Kerr black hole", they also asked "if this thing is a binary pair, what does it look like?", getting the answer "Kinda donut shaped", and "if this is a spiral galaxy, what does it look like?", getting the answer "Kinda donut shaped".
It is fair to conclude that with a high probability, it's donut shaped. As predicted by the Kerr model.
I doubt there'll be a Nobel for this, but it's good science, and will only improve in time, as they expand the array (to the moon, hopefully!)
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, @01:17AM (9 children)
A case of begging the question [wikipedia.org]?
Fits my "That's Photoshoped" feeling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @08:00AM (7 children)
If you saw a roadsign peppered with holes, would you say that it was invalid to pull our a bunch of simulated shotgun distributions at different guages in order to work out the likely guage and distance of firing? What if they also compared the sign to a whole bunch of photos of vomit, rhododendra, and pizzas? Do you think it's invalid for them to say "if that roadsign has a pizza on it, then it's a pizza with no bread, tomato, or cheese, so it's not a pizza"? Because that's what this team have done.
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, @09:52AM (6 children)
The difference between a "roadsign peppered with holes" and "the photo of the event horizon of a blackhole" is that:
- for the first you have plenty of direct observations and can organize experiments to validate your model; *while*
- for the second you don't have any other observations, not even a way to confirm your result by other means and there's no way you can organize an experiment
Crapload of what images? Of the black hole?
Threw away what? Models/algos or images?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:36AM (5 children)
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, @11:30AM (4 children)
And did you understand it? Enough to explain it in your own words?
---
'cause I'm hearing (09:50) "If all the image types produce a very similar looking image, we become more confident that the images we are using are not biasing the picture" - and the screen shows that all 3 types of images (including "everyday" type), after passing through the algorithm, result in the same picture of a black hole.
Which, heck of a coincidence, 2 years later, resembles the picture reconstituted from collected data.
Now, I'm not saying that "experimental data fitting" (non-linear regression by least squares, chi-square minimisation, whaevs) is invalid as a technique.
But that technique does not validate a model or and algorithm. It just says: "assuming the model is valid and the output depends so-and-so of this set of parameters, then this set of experimental data can be explained best by this set of values for parameters". However, there can be heaps of models that would explain the same experimental data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:05PM (3 children)
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.
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, @10:01PM (2 children)
That TeD talk youtube? Is "Published on Dec 7, 2016"
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)
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
Ok, will leave it here, then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday April 11 2019, @07:02PM
I never would have pegged c0lo as a black-hole denier. Some times one must just defer to the expertise of those who are better at confirmation bias and making stuff up than one is oneself.
(Score: 2) by mrkaos on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:45AM (1 child)
Now we know what it looks like.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:48AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf_YWiqqv34 [youtube.com]