Scientific breakthrough - photo of a black hole - Progressive Rock Music Forum

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

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."

Keep in mind that the by far biggest telescope on earth has a diameter of a bit over a 100 meters (almost 104), so this means that this virtual telescope is about one hundred twenty-five thousand times as big as the biggest telescope on earth.

Edited by BaldFriede - April 11 2019 at 05:29

BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue.

BaldFriede wrote:

Sean Trane wrote:

national newspaper headlines (I'll let you translate for yourself )

newspaper headlines

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"?

That's what the woman in attendance is meaning; but not daring to say it

https://rateyourmusic.com/~siLLy_puPPy

progaardvark wrote:

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

Other sources say that all of the telescopes involved in this amassed 5 petabytes of data. That's a lot of disc space.

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).

Edited by BaldFriede - April 11 2019 at 08:21

BaldJean and I; I am the one in blue.

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?

A team a 30+ worked on the algorithm... not that BBC cares

They were afraid we would see this:

"Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp

Snicolette wrote:

They were afraid we would see this:

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

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

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"There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette

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