Like everything in science it's a step in a process. Compare it to the first pictures of the planets in our solar system, first blurry and vague, now rather vibrant and clear. Indeed the true achievement of this event isn't actually the blackhole itself but the tech that was developed to find said blackhole. Could help us find out even more about our universe, and what resources/threats exist within.
Indeed this picture may not have ground breaking effects on your day to day life. But i'm sure they said the same thing about the first engine which would have been nothing but a novelty at the time.
Because frequently "thoughts" become reality, someone has to observe things and develop ideas to invent anything. Such as planes or cars, or music and other creations. Hell, even science fiction has frequently become reality through inspiration and the desire of inventors. As to why they can't give us reasons? Lack of available information at the time, maybe as we keep observing, testing and exploring they'll be able to give us a reason, an answer. And that's what makes science so damn awesome to some people, that possibility that with enough work and dedication anyone could help discover information about our universe. (Though a blackhole cannot allow passage back in time, as we know at this moment it's a super dense object that creates enough gravitational pull to draw everything including light to it. Hence why having even a blurry photo of it is pretty wicked.)
These astronomical discoveries and achievements like this really get me excited! I've been interested in space stuff since I was pretty small, so when I saw the picture this morning on the news I nearly jumped out of my chair in the break room at work. Sure, the photo doesn't exactly show detail, but who cares, it's a hell of a lot better than anything we had before!
There is still so much we don't know about blackholes, it's part of their mystical allure to those into science fiction. How do they form? How are they stable? How much force to they actually exert. Does every other galaxy have a black hole at it's center? This is just an early step on what's potentially an entire branch of science. Hell it's possible we could harness them for energy creation in some manner, like the tides or solar energy. I dunno, I find all of it rather awesome.
And if as Stormatious believes blackholes don't exist (which is a possibility.) then that leaves the question of what causes these strange anomalies we observe absorbing light and matter from solar bodies such as stars (something we have observed and is rather beautiful in a chilling way.)
For those who understand VLBI, this is an impressive feat. I can remember many a time sitting in class and having discussions about what this image might be like. When I worked for NRAO as a tour guide several years ago at one of their installations, we would always get questions about what a Black Hole looks like. It's amazing to think we'll now be able to show people.
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
I'm actually curious as to what you mean? Like, you obviously seem to have some genuine knowledge/interest in the subject. Do you mean the "hole" part of the name confusing people? Much like how darkmatter isn't actually just stuff that's black but a sort of catchall term for a spectrum of stuff in the galaxy we don't quite understand yet. But then you see it in sci-fi as some sort of weapon material.
This thread got really stupid and rule breaking really quickly. We have three rules here and they are easy to remember, follow them. Any more rule breaking, insults, spam or thread derailment will earn their poster a warning or a vacation from the site as merited.
queen_annes_revenge wrote: I didn't even know there was aparantly a black hole in the centre if our galaxy.
A very big one, or maybe a bunch of smaller ones. Its thought that most galaxies have a black hole cluster in the very middle, which provides the center of mass for the whole galaxy to orbit around.
Desubot wrote: Its a real cool visualization of a thing we could never see. but does a shadow of an object count as a picture of that object?
It's more the very bright stuff around the black hole, presumably lit up from collisions with Hawking Radiation.
Not Hakwing radiation. Hawking radiation is a very slow release of energy as it requires extremely specific conditions for the radiation generated to escape the hole. Most of the light emitted from black hole systems is due to the incredible heat generated as the matter is pulled into the black hole. Good old friction between the particles of dust. In some AGN (active galactic nuclei) this can even kick photons up to X-ray energy levels through a process called inverse compton scattering.
Black Hole accretion is incredibly efficient at converting matter to radiation, up to 52 times more efficient than fusion, capable of converting up to 6% of the rest energy into radiation.
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
I'm actually curious as to what you mean? Like, you obviously seem to have some genuine knowledge/interest in the subject. Do you mean the "hole" part of the name confusing people? Much like how darkmatter isn't actually just stuff that's black but a sort of catchall term for a spectrum of stuff in the galaxy we don't quite understand yet. But then you see it in sci-fi as some sort of weapon material.
He's talking about the technology used to take the image, not the black hole itself.
Basically, they used multiple telescopes around the world, and by precisely synchronising the time at which they individually took an image, they could combine the separate images into one, which increases the resolution (effectively it's as if they took a single image using a telescope as wide as the earth).
As for the image itself, remember the black hole in Inception?
The black hole is in the middle. The glowing ring around it is the matter falling in, being heated by friction as it does so. That's what this new image shows you (what looks like the vertical ring around the black hole in the Inception image is actually the light from the ring on the other side of the black hole being bent by the gravity of the hole so that it's sent almost back on itself). The difference here is that the shot from inception is looking at the black hole from roughly its equator, whereas this new image is looking down from roughly one of the poles.
cody.d. wrote: There is still so much we don't know about blackholes, it's part of their mystical allure to those into science fiction. How do they form? How are they stable? How much force to they actually exert. Does every other galaxy have a black hole at it's center? This is just an early step on what's potentially an entire branch of science. Hell it's possible we could harness them for energy creation in some manner, like the tides or solar energy. I dunno, I find all of it rather awesome.
And if as Stormatious believes blackholes don't exist (which is a possibility.) then that leaves the question of what causes these strange anomalies we observe absorbing light and matter from solar bodies such as stars (something we have observed and is rather beautiful in a chilling way.)
Most likely all that is involved is massive, superdense bodies pulling together and collapsing into something even more massive. Which would make them fairly common in the center of galaxies, due to local density of stars in the galaxies we've observed. Nothing mystical about it, just gravity.
The sheer mass would likely be what keeps them stable. And unlike fiction, the 'affect' of a black hole is 'you are dead,' long before you get anywhere near it (let alone 'going through' it) We aren't a species that does well in large multiples of 1G.
Actually, you could cross the event horizon of this black hole easily. At a radius of 80 AU (twice the orbital radius of Pluto round the Sun), the tidal forces will be irrelevant, so you can just fly through without noticing - until you try to get out ...
There are mathematical solutions of the equations of General Relativity that appear to allow an object to travel into its own past, but they're all rather unusual (for example, they aren't compatible with the universe as we observe it). If I'm understanding correctly, the interior of a rotating black hole is one of those solutions, but ultimately it doesn't matter since you won't be able to get back out again to tell anyone. Or, it's all just a mathematical artefact and it isn't really like that. Regardless, it's all totally theoretical and there's no way for us to make use of the theory with any forseeable technology. Makes for a good sci fi novel and lests the author throw around terms like "Kerr Metric", "closed timelike curves" and suchlike to sound cool, that's all.
And as has been mentioned previously, exactly that effect has been measured on Earth; sufficiently accurate clocks sent up in aircraft will measure less elapsed time than ones left on the ground.
AndrewGPaul wrote: Actually, you could cross the event horizon of this black hole easily. At a radius of 80 AU (twice the orbital radius of Pluto round the Sun), the tidal forces will be irrelevant, so you can just fly through without noticing - until you try to get out ...
There are mathematical solutions of the equations of General Relativity that appear to allow an object to travel into its own past, but they're all rather unusual (for example, they aren't compatible with the universe as we observe it). If I'm understanding correctly, the interior of a rotating black hole is one of those solutions, but ultimately it doesn't matter since you won't be able to get back out again to tell anyone. Or, it's all just a mathematical artefact and it isn't really like that. Regardless, it's all totally theoretical and there's no way for us to make use of the theory with any forseeable technology. Makes for a good sci fi novel and lests the author throw around terms like "Kerr Metric", "closed timelike curves" and suchlike to sound cool, that's all.
The numerical solutions for the Kerr metric (spinning neutral black hole) results in two event horizons. The first solution inner event horizon is the same as the schwarzchild metric, this is the literal point of no return. The outer event horizon creates a region known as the ergosphere. This is the volume between the inner and outer event horizons. This outer event horizon, however, is different to the inner event horizon. Rather than being a point of no return, it actually signifies a point at which, once you go past it, you must begin to rotate in the same direction as the black hole.
This allows for the Penrose process, a means of harnessing power from black holes by draining their angular momentum. In short: send object on trajectory through ergosphere, it gains angular momentum from black hole, convert angular momentum to energy.
AndrewGPaul wrote: And as has been mentioned previously, exactly that effect has been measured on Earth; sufficiently accurate clocks sent up in aircraft will measure less elapsed time than ones left on the ground.
Yup. If we did not account for this with the GPS satellites, they would be losing ~10km of accuracy a day.
Presumably if you do that enough the black hole stops spinning and you end up with a Schwarzchild black hole?
Now there's a thought for an interstellar war ... One side uses Kerr metric black holes to travel in time (mumblemumble magic technology to get back out again ...), the other side fires stuff at the black holes to stop them spinning.
It seems you are explaining what i was already trying to say which is yes the further some thing away the longer it takes to get there etc, but i dont see how what you are saying explains why i am wrong about a galaxy being a mass... inside the unverise which HAS mass.?
It's not about taking longer to get there. It is about the time between events. If you are 30 light years away from a the person flashing the light at you, it doesn't matter if you are in a well or not, it will take 30 years for the light to reach you. The time between the flashes, however, will change depending on if you are inside a gravity well or not.
Ok ill think about this further.
Thank you.
Can I suggest that perhaps instead of just thinking about it, doing a substantial amount of reading on the subject may be better? Relativity is a bit of a mind-bender until you get the core concepts straight. Wikipedia is a good place to start, though there are plenty of other sources of information that explain relativity in fairly straight forward fashion.
AndrewGPaul wrote: Presumably if you do that enough the black hole stops spinning and you end up with a Schwarzchild black hole?
Yup. The theoretical maximum amount of energy that can be extracted is around 29% of the black holes original mass, which is a huge amount of energy.
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AndrewGPaul wrote: For all the memes about nobody finishing A Brief History of Time, I found it pretty straightforward.
The dodgy ebook version I had was less so, since the illustrations were mssing.
Oh wow, relativity without illustrations sounds pretty horrible
I recommend Why Does E=MC2 by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw for anyone interested in relativity but not particularly confident in their maths/science ability. It does a great job breaking it all down into an easily understandable concept (well, as close as relativity gets to that). It also does a nice job of showing how easy it can be to derive the equations used in special relativity. You can literally get the lorentz factor for special relativity time dilation, length contraction, velocity transforms etc. using nothing more complicated than pythagoras' theorem, which is pretty cool. It only has a bit at the end about general relativity (much harder to derive anything mathematically for general relativity due to it's usage of differential calculus and tensors) but it has a nice thought experiment to demonstrate the point.
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
I'm actually curious as to what you mean? Like, you obviously seem to have some genuine knowledge/interest in the subject. Do you mean the "hole" part of the name confusing people? Much like how darkmatter isn't actually just stuff that's black but a sort of catchall term for a spectrum of stuff in the galaxy we don't quite understand yet. But then you see it in sci-fi as some sort of weapon material.
The general public reaction to this in news article comment sections has been terrible. People can't grasp why the image is so pixelated, or what the process was in recording this image. I've seen some of the most bat guano crazy statements about this out there, from people claiming it to be fake, to people claiming that it is a conspiracy. A local radio program yesterday (where my parents live) had a Scientist from UMKC on to talk about the discovery. After the segment was over, the two hosts began to make statements about the scientists "common sense." I'm not sure what the term for that is, but it's when a person feels intimidated by another, and so they try and belittle them for the thing that makes them feel inferior. It seems to me, as someone who has been involved in this field for many years, that each year that passes gets worse and worse for general science knowledge in the public. If you go to any NASA site that allows comments, 70% of the comments will be nonsensical, insane rantings, or cries of conspiracy. Probably because the internet has given people of lower ability spaces to congregate and share their ideas.
Another story I can share involves a Doctor my mother works with. I was speaking with him about another Astronomical topic last time I was home. I was amazed that someone who has set through college physics, couldn't grasp a simple concept (interferometry). Not even on a mathematical level, but on a conceptual level. It was truly a disheartening experience.
Oh wow, relativity without illustrations sounds pretty horrible .
Luckily I'd read it before, in a proper edition, and the remnants of my physics degree are still here and there in my brain. Actually, if I'd been reading a book about relativity that had been deliberately written with no illustrations, it wouldn't have been so bad. But this had bits like "And as shown in the diagram above ..." with no diagram.
And yes, the celebration of ignorance in the media is depressing. There's no shame in not knowing about relativity or black holes, or not understanding why the discovery might be important; it's been a couple of centuries since there was sufficiently little science that you could know about all of it. But being actively proud that you don't know something? Thinking that you're better than someone because they know/understand/get excited about something you don't? I can't be bothered with that sort of scum.
Kilkrazy wrote: Why the feth would anyone fake a pixellated image of a black hole? Aren't there better things to fake?
Unfortunately, the internet has become a place that not only allows, but encourages delusional people to congregate and spread their ideas. From Anti-Vaccination groups, to Flat Earthers, Moon Conspirators, and "New World Order" believers. With mental illness on the rise, it's only going to get worse.
AndrewGPaul wrote: ...it's been a couple of centuries since there was sufficiently little science that you could know about all of it.
Only roughly 150 years if you exclude "catalogue sciences" like archeology/history of various flavours. Many of key modern broad fields of empiric science did not even exist pre XX century (e.g. neurology, but this also applies medicine as a whole, with anatomy being a huge "hot news" in early XIX century), some pre mid-XX century (neuropharmacology), with many emerging only after affordable computing boom of 1990s (basically entire modern neuroscience started with introduction of fMRI). You learn almost all pre 1850 scientific knowledge during modern, good high school course - MIT entry algebra exams from 1869 are at the late modern primary/early high school levels of complexity. Era of multi-field geniuses pushing knowledge forward by solo effort that XIX century is full of ended only around Manhattan Project.
And such basic concept of modern science as falsification is just 90 years old.
I recommend Why Does E=MC2 by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw for anyone interested in relativity but not particularly confident in their maths/science ability. It does a great job breaking it all down into an easily understandable concept (well, as close as relativity gets to that). It also does a nice job of showing how easy it can be to derive the equations used in special relativity. You can literally get the lorentz factor for special relativity time dilation, length contraction, velocity transforms etc. using nothing more complicated than pythagoras' theorem, which is pretty cool. It only has a bit at the end about general relativity (much harder to derive anything mathematically for general relativity due to it's usage of differential calculus and tensors) but it has a nice thought experiment to demonstrate the point.
I'd highly recommend the PBS Space Time channel also. They usually do a pretty decent job in trying to make things understandable. Or at least it seems like they do to a dumb, dumb like me. 4D non-Euclidean geometry still throws me for a "loop" sort of, but I watched a video of Leonard Susskind explaining some of the mathematical principles relating to the "spacetime interval" that make sense, but sure are not "intelligible" to me.
To me, that the "speed of light" is a sort of "speed of causality" which is actually the "sapcetime interval" is actually really fascinating. Even if it "don't make no sense" to my monkey brain.
To me, that the "speed of light" is a sort of "speed of causality" which is actually the "sapcetime interval" is actually really fascinating. Even if it "don't make no sense" to my monkey brain.
Mhmm. If the spacetime interval you're referring to is what I think it is then there's also another cool fact.
Thanks to special relativity, we know that different observers won't necessarily agree with the spatial distance travelled by an object (thanks to length contraction), or the time measured by a clock (thanks to time dilation). They won't even necessarily agree on the velocity of an object (unless that object is a photon). But, what all observers, no matter the differences in their measured times of an event and different measurements of the distance travelled, can agree on is the distance in spacetime that an object has travelled. You plug in each persons different measurements of time and distances and they will all come out to the same spacetime interval. A really nice demonstration of the fact that whilst it seems that relativity makes everything insane and confusing and paradoxical, it actually creates universal truths. No matter what perspective one is observing this stuff from, if you're careful and do your maths right, you will get the same answer as someone on the other side of the universe, even though all of your individual measurements are different.
Kilkrazy wrote: Why the feth would anyone fake a pixellated image of a black hole? Aren't there better things to fake?
Because being first places you in the limelight and gets you a prestigous amount of press and acknowledgement. The outcome is that you are almost certainly get funded for further research, valuable permanent professorships and it sets up your science career for the rest of your like (financially and at the universities). The science field (especially astronomy) is pretty dog-eat-dog because of the relatively low funding. There will be people that actively try and disrupt others work or give themselves an advantage (steal results and data etc).
In the worst cases you can get the following scenarios. Firstly a scientist or team deliberately treat, falisfy or miscommunicate their findings to get the result they want. As in the case of Hwang Woo-Suk in Korea and stem cell research.
The alternative is that results are rushed to beat another party. In this case all other reasonable scenarios are not explored and a desired conclusion is drawn from the data without appropriate challenge. This was similar to what happened with the cosmic background radiation experiement using BICEP. In this case they went to early and claimed a result before exploring more localised causes of the effect (at a galaxy level) they were seeing. It made a big media splash and could be argued was solely done to beat another team using other data to the result.
Finally there can be concerns over the the programming tools used that can enhance features and over exagerate them. There is still some concern with the the results from the gravitational wave experiments and that it could be due to the way the software was written to search to find certain features. Last time I read the data and software hadn't been made publicly available so that the results can be challenged and that other scenarios can be excluded (i.e. the results are repeatable).
Now I am not saying that this is the case here, but there have been a number of cases relatively recently where the science has been shown to be a bit flakey because of the mad dash for money/publicity. People believing things are faked can be a natural consequence of this behaviour.
To me, that the "speed of light" is a sort of "speed of causality" which is actually the "sapcetime interval" is actually really fascinating. Even if it "don't make no sense" to my monkey brain.
Mhmm. If the spacetime interval you're referring to is what I think it is then there's also another cool fact.
Thanks to special relativity, we know that different observers won't necessarily agree with the spatial distance travelled by an object (thanks to length contraction), or the time measured by a clock (thanks to time dilation). They won't even necessarily agree on the velocity of an object (unless that object is a photon). But, what all observers, no matter the differences in their measured times of an event and different measurements of the distance travelled, can agree on is the distance in spacetime that an object has travelled. You plug in each persons different measurements of time and distances and they will all come out to the same spacetime interval. A really nice demonstration of the fact that whilst it seems that relativity makes everything insane and confusing and paradoxical, it actually creates universal truths. No matter what perspective one is observing this stuff from, if you're careful and do your maths right, you will get the same answer as someone on the other side of the universe, even though all of your individual measurements are different.
That's pretty cool.
Well, again, from my "primitive" understanding, what we are discussing it what is invariant in preforming the Lorenz transformation.
Again, it is not as if I understand this, but this video is where I "essentially" got this from: The Speed of Light is NOT About Light. They even go on to explain that this (seemingly) must be the case, because the Lorenz transformation seems to be the case. If it were not, (seemingly) there wouldn't even be mass or space or time at all (because of how energy, mass and "c" seem to be related). In a similar way that we can suppose that a temperature absolute zero is not possible, because were that possible, it would grant infinite momentum, which would not seem to make any sense at all, given what else seems to be the case in the rest of physics.
The infinite momentum from absolute zero theory is based upon the fact that if you could make a cube of absolute zero, anything outside of that cube would be absorbed into it.
Almost exactly like how a black hole pulls everything in.
This is because the complete lack of motion by atomic particles would in theory absorb any energy from outside particles.
Eihnlazer wrote: The infinite momentum from absolute zero theory is based upon the fact that if you could make a cube of absolute zero, anything outside of that cube would be absorbed into it.
Almost exactly like how a black hole pulls everything in.
This is because the complete lack of motion by atomic particles would in theory absorb any energy from outside particles.
Interesting, although my monkey brain still wants to imagine "forces" in the Newtonian sense, whatever constitutes the "thinking thing" I seem to sometimes be knows this is not "true."
I just keep repeating to myself that John Wheeler quote: “Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move... Mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve.”
In general relativity, the effects of gravitation are ascribed to spacetime curvature instead of a force. The starting point for general relativity is the equivalence principle, which equates free fall with inertial motion and describes free-falling inertial objects as being accelerated relative to non-inertial observers on the ground.[19][20] In Newtonian physics, however, no such acceleration can occur unless at least one of the objects is being operated on by a force.
Einstein proposed that spacetime is curved by matter, and that free-falling objects are moving along locally straight paths in curved spacetime. These straight paths are called geodesics. Like Newton's first law of motion, Einstein's theory states that if a force is applied on an object, it would deviate from a geodesic. For instance, we are no longer following geodesics while standing because the mechanical resistance of the Earth exerts an upward force on us, and we are non-inertial on the ground as a result. This explains why moving along the geodesics in spacetime is considered inertial.
Point of order: the image of the black hole on the previous page is not from Inception, but rather from Interstellar, a truly amazing movie on many levels! Indeed, the look of the black hole in that movie might be my favorite thing about it, as they captured exactly what one of those should look like.
One of my favorite things about black holes in general is how the extreme gravity messes with everything near them. Like, if you were close enough to the event horizon, you could actually see your own back in front of you! Really trippy stuff. And time slows way way down as well (something else they got right in Interstellar- that movie is just full of scientific win!) when you are close to the black hole, so you could essentially travel to the future by going close enough for long enough. The laws of physics as we know them actually break down once you cross the event horizon (the math starts giving nonsensical answers that aren't possible in our normal universe).
I’m no scientist by any means but I always thought Black Holes were super dense, super massive (as in lots of mass) objects with an extremely high gravitational pull and had nothing to do with magnetism?
Nostromodamus wrote: I’m no scientist by any means but I always thought Black Holes were super dense, super massive (as in lots of mass) objects with an extremely high gravitational pull and had nothing to do with magnetism?
I already did read about it dude, what i am saying is exactly how magnets act. Nothing can escape black holes etc because of gravity but in the case we can just say magnets.
If you find the topic annoying and cannot be bothered to even understand the basics of black holes (no, they aren't caused by magnets spinning), please just leave.
Stormatious wrote: Im happy to leave knowing that i have stated why einstein is wrong with no one telling me how my explanation is wrong, just saying i dont know the basics, i have read it the wiki. Sorry that's such a big offense to you guys.
Einstein was wrong about what exactly? The existence of black holes. He himself didn't believe in black holes even though his equations on general relativity lead others to identify them later. Seriously, a basic understanding would help you out tremendously. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_unsuccessful_investigations
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
I'm actually curious as to what you mean? Like, you obviously seem to have some genuine knowledge/interest in the subject. Do you mean the "hole" part of the name confusing people? Much like how darkmatter isn't actually just stuff that's black but a sort of catchall term for a spectrum of stuff in the galaxy we don't quite understand yet. But then you see it in sci-fi as some sort of weapon material.
The general public reaction to this in news article comment sections has been terrible. People can't grasp why the image is so pixelated, or what the process was in recording this image. I've seen some of the most bat guano crazy statements about this out there, from people claiming it to be fake, to people claiming that it is a conspiracy. A local radio program yesterday (where my parents live) had a Scientist from UMKC on to talk about the discovery. After the segment was over, the two hosts began to make statements about the scientists "common sense." I'm not sure what the term for that is, but it's when a person feels intimidated by another, and so they try and belittle them for the thing that makes them feel inferior. It seems to me, as someone who has been involved in this field for many years, that each year that passes gets worse and worse for general science knowledge in the public. If you go to any NASA site that allows comments, 70% of the comments will be nonsensical, insane rantings, or cries of conspiracy. Probably because the internet has given people of lower ability spaces to congregate and share their ideas.
Another story I can share involves a Doctor my mother works with. I was speaking with him about another Astronomical topic last time I was home. I was amazed that someone who has set through college physics, couldn't grasp a simple concept (interferometry). Not even on a mathematical level, but on a conceptual level. It was truly a disheartening experience.
The dunning kruger effect springs to mind although it's not exactly what you described. It's basically because people have access to so much information nowadays they believe they are better informed than most experts on that chosen subject. Seen in large quantities in 'anti vax moms' who'd rather trust 'their own research' than science.
But if you don't find it amazing it just proves the earlier point about people's intelligence, if they can't comprehend the gravity (sorry) of such an achievement.
The Dunning-Kruger effect speaks to competence, not intelligence. You can be very smart and not be competent in any number of things, and astrophysics is a pretty dense field.
Remember, Dunning-Kruger cuts both ways: incompetent people don't realize they're incompetent at stuff, but highly competent people don't realize how complex a subject they are an SME on is to non-experts. I do that all the time with IT stuff, I assume it's all very straightforward but for the normies, it really isn't.
I don't think I'm dumb but I didn't know that there was a giant black hole at the center of our own galaxy as well until yesterday.
I don't mean competent or incompetent as insults here, I want to be clear - we could use "qualified and unqualified" as synonyms in this context.
Ouze wrote: The Dunning-Kruger effect speaks to competence, not intelligence. You can be very smart and not be competent in any number of things, and astrophysics is a pretty dense field.
Remember, Dunning-Kruger cuts both ways: incompetent people don't realize they're incompetent at stuff, but highly competent people don't realize how complex a subject they are an SME on is to non-experts. I do that all the time with IT stuff, I assume it's all very straightforward but for the normies, it really isn't.
I don't think I'm dumb but I didn't know that there was a giant black hole at the center of our own galaxy as well until yesterday.
I don't mean competent or incompetent as insults here, I want to be clear - we could use "qualified and unqualified" as synonyms in this context.
Yeah. You know what I'm getting at though. They think they know more than doctors and scientists.
It's the same when for me when people talk about IEDs or landmines online.. You know the old step on but can't step off again landmines from behind enemy lines? Yeah they totally exist dude...
What we are seeing is the distortion of the background light due to the mass of the blackhole in the way (like types of lenses). This of course does not reduce the technical aspects of the work, however it is a bit pre-emptive to state that we have 'seen' the Black Hole.
It also explains why the image is not more 'thrilling', because the 'glow' is just 'background' glow that has been 'lensed' and 'distorted' by the mass infront of it. We are not looking at the actual environment of the blackhole per se.
Here's a video explaining that bit — the black centre part in the middle of the image not being the event horizon — in slightly more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
It now has a name, Powehi. It comes from a Hawaiian myth of creation and means "embellished dark source of unending creation". Strange to think what we are looking at is actually it 56 million years ago.
Astronomers collaborated with renowned UH at Hilo Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani Hawaiian language professor and cultural practitioner Larry Kimura for the Hawaiian naming of the black hole. Pōwehi, meaning embellished dark source of unending creation, is a name sourced from the Kumulipo, the primordial chant describing the creation of the Hawaiian universe. Pō, profound dark source of unending creation, is a concept emphasized and repeated in the Kumulipo, while wehi, or wehiwehi, honored with embellishments, is one of many descriptions of pō in the chant.
At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens turned and changed,
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,
At the time of the night of Makalii (winter)
Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness, of the depth of darkness,
The source of Night, of the depth of night
Of the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun in the depth of night,
Night is come,
Born is Night
The second section, containing the remaining nine wā, is ao and is signaled by the arrival of light and the gods, who watch over the changing of animals into the first humans. After that is the complex genealogy of Kalaninuiamamao that goes all the way to the late 18th century.
Gael Knight wrote: Sad to see that people can't just appreciate this cool thing and have to show off what big brains they have on a toy soldier forum.
The vastness of this alone is mind bending.
I was teasing. Anyway that's what 50 'astronomical units' so distance between earth and the sun? That's quite massive.
To put the Solar system into context there here is a image that overlays it's diameter over the image
The region is truly massive (and the event horizon if smaller is still huge).
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Gael Knight wrote: Sad to see that people can't just appreciate this cool thing and have to show off what big brains they have on a toy soldier forum.
The vastness of this alone is mind bending.
Yes it is. However, it is not a case of showing off. It is important that everyone has the actual facts. Otherwise it can genuinely cause fatigue with the populace as a whole over time (and also generates cynicism). At some point we will probably get an actual image of a blackhole (or really its very local horizon/environment). The general lay person will not know the difference between this image and another (likely pixelated image) of the local environments of a black hole etc and that can result in the public not truly understanding the enormity of the achievement. Each piece of work is highly skilled piece of work but should be advertised for what it is rather than 'exaggerate' the claim.
A better claim would be "Direct Evidence of the a highly massive, but dark object in the centre of a galaxy"; but it does not quite have the same ring as "First picture of a black hole". The former is more accurate, the latter is broader for effect but can lead to a public's misintepretation of what they are looking at (i.e. the dark internal 'smudge' is not the black hole).
Gael Knight wrote: Sad to see that people can't just appreciate this cool thing and have to show off what big brains they have on a toy soldier forum.
The vastness of this alone is mind bending.
YMMV, but doesn’t it make it even more wonderful if you know more about this phenomenon? I mean, the picture itself isn’t very interesting; it’s only once you know what’s going on that the majesty of it all hits home.
Every time real science is done ( with observations ) I celebrate a little
Now, if I could only find a way to hook my old, dying phone to that black hole, maybe its vast amount of energy will keep the thing powered for more than 10 minutes at a time!!
Would be nice to know how this pic was done. Some formula was needed and enormous amount of raw data. Stacks upon stacks of hard drive"s worth of data. That's...lots of data!
tneva82 wrote: Would be nice to know how this pic was done. Some formula was needed and enormous amount of raw data. Stacks upon stacks of hard drive"s worth of data. That's...lots of data!
Basically, each of the observatories involved took a measurement of M87 at the exact same time. These observatories are positioned all over the world. You then use the time difference between the received signal at each observatory (due to some being further away than others, resulting in a time delay due to the speed of light) to sync up the observations, which gives you more photons gathered at each time step of the observation. This effectively allows you to create a virtual telescope with an aperture equal to the maximum difference between the telescopes. With this one that was pretty much the diameter of the Earth. That huge aperture gives you huge light gathering capability, which is incredibly important in astronomy as your light gathering capability is directly linked to your maximum useful magnification and resolution.
The syncing up of the images is carried out using an algorithm and a lot of computing time, considering the huge amount of data which is used.
So, like an ultrasonic array probe FMC imaging technique. I know how those work, cool!
I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't been done before. The algorithms for this kind of triangulation have been around for a while, being used in among others seismology, and more recently ultrasonic weld inspection (I qualified the system our company developed to DNV standard, for example).
Maybe it wasn't done because of the computing power required? And I imagine syncing up a bunch of radio telescopes scattered across the world is somewhat more complicated than firing off ultrasonic elements.
Bran Dawri wrote: So, like an ultrasonic array probe FMC imaging technique. I know how those work, cool! I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't been done before. The algorithms for this kind of triangulation have been around for a while, being used in among others seismology, and more recently ultrasonic weld inspection (I qualified the system our company developed to DNV standard, for example). Maybe it wasn't done because of the computing power required? And I imagine syncing up a bunch of radio telescopes scattered across the world is somewhat more complicated than firing off ultrasonic elements.
That and the issue of weather. If you do not have good conditions over your telescope, then its observation is not going to be helpful, which can then limit the maximum difference between your observatories, affecting the aperture of the virtual scope. The observation for this image was made in 2017 on a day when it just so happened to have good conditions at all the observatories, and it has then taken two years to carry out the computations to get the image and do all the double checking of the results etc.
Bran Dawri wrote: So, like an ultrasonic array probe FMC imaging technique. I know how those work, cool!
I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't been done before. The algorithms for this kind of triangulation have been around for a while, being used in among others seismology, and more recently ultrasonic weld inspection (I qualified the system our company developed to DNV standard, for example).
Maybe it wasn't done because of the computing power required? And I imagine syncing up a bunch of radio telescopes scattered across the world is somewhat more complicated than firing off ultrasonic elements.
Well apparantely the algorithm needed for this was came up couple years ago.
Bran Dawri wrote: So, like an ultrasonic array probe FMC imaging technique. I know how those work, cool!
I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't been done before. The algorithms for this kind of triangulation have been around for a while, being used in among others seismology, and more recently ultrasonic weld inspection (I qualified the system our company developed to DNV standard, for example).
Maybe it wasn't done because of the computing power required? And I imagine syncing up a bunch of radio telescopes scattered across the world is somewhat more complicated than firing off ultrasonic elements.
That and the issue of weather. If you do not have good conditions over your telescope, then its observation is not going to be helpful, which can then limit the maximum difference between your observatories, affecting the aperture of the virtual scope. The observation for this image was made in 2017 on a day when it just so happened to have good conditions at all the observatories, and it has then taken two years to carry out the computations to get the image and do all the double checking of the results etc.
Part of that was because there are petabytes of data from each individual observatory (that's thousands of terabytes, or millions of gigabytes), they couldn't send it over the internet and had to physically fly the hard drives to one location. One of the obervatories is in Antarctica, and was cut off by bad weather for six months and they couldn't get a flight out.
Unfortunately I have to make this comment, and I might get dinged for it, but, here goes...
This achievement has shown me just how uneducated, and poorly reasoned our society has become. Just reading through some of the comments today, listening to the media coverage has made my ears and eyes bleed. It's amazing how out of touch the public is with very simple science.
I'm actually curious as to what you mean? Like, you obviously seem to have some genuine knowledge/interest in the subject. Do you mean the "hole" part of the name confusing people? Much like how darkmatter isn't actually just stuff that's black but a sort of catchall term for a spectrum of stuff in the galaxy we don't quite understand yet. But then you see it in sci-fi as some sort of weapon material.
The general public reaction to this in news article comment sections has been terrible. People can't grasp why the image is so pixelated, or what the process was in recording this image. I've seen some of the most bat guano crazy statements about this out there, from people claiming it to be fake, to people claiming that it is a conspiracy. A local radio program yesterday (where my parents live) had a Scientist from UMKC on to talk about the discovery. After the segment was over, the two hosts began to make statements about the scientists "common sense." I'm not sure what the term for that is, but it's when a person feels intimidated by another, and so they try and belittle them for the thing that makes them feel inferior. It seems to me, as someone who has been involved in this field for many years, that each year that passes gets worse and worse for general science knowledge in the public. If you go to any NASA site that allows comments, 70% of the comments will be nonsensical, insane rantings, or cries of conspiracy. Probably because the internet has given people of lower ability spaces to congregate and share their ideas.
Another story I can share involves a Doctor my mother works with. I was speaking with him about another Astronomical topic last time I was home. I was amazed that someone who has set through college physics, couldn't grasp a simple concept (interferometry). Not even on a mathematical level, but on a conceptual level. It was truly a disheartening experience.
The dunning kruger effect springs to mind although it's not exactly what you described. It's basically because people have access to so much information nowadays they believe they are better informed than most experts on that chosen subject. Seen in large quantities in 'anti vax moms' who'd rather trust 'their own research' than science.
No doubt. I just saw a comment on social media this morning in which a man said and I quote "I don't trust big pharma and vaccines can kill, so to hell with your "herd" immunity, I'll protect my child, even if it might mean yours will get sick and die from some infection later on."
An effect which is not helped by constant reports of "a new study shows" followed by something either outrageous or blindingly obvious when the referenced study showed or was intended for nothing remotely like the report claims.
It is very disheartening, but I think this sort of stupidity has always existed, the internet just gives it a megaphone, and algorithms used by the likes of Youtube and Facebook act as magnifiers for stupidity. I reckon some serious regulation is coming down the line for that lot, and I won't shed any tears. Because they have absolutely failed to grasp the issues they are creating.
Another issue is people refusing to believe facts that don't fit with their worldview. A few years ago on here I mentioned in passing that CO2 was not the most significant greenhouse gas, and that water vapour was much more significant (I was obliquely making a point about positive feedback loops, I figured people would join the dots) and several posters reacted like I was some sort of crackpot.
