First ever black hole image released

[msommers]

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47873592?fbclid=IwAR0KWiqfixEHpIxJXuXnLRFdY72YKyhA-_gfHkHyyDlgm5dsCn8pEpmzY34

85545

BBC did a decent job breaking this down for those of us who really don't know much about astrophysics, and what this project entailed.

[A790]

Exactly what we expected to see, which is very reassuring.

We are but specks of dust.

[Xtrema]

Hawkings would love to see this.

[Brent.ff]

...so when i look into some lights and then shut my eyes.. got it

[mazdavirgin]

For those confused as to what you're seeing and why the asymmetry of the image is crucial veritasium has a decent layman's explanation.

zUyH3XhpLTo

[BavarianBeast]

Eye of Sauron

[vengie]

Eye of Sauron

nerd.



What an incredible feat though, very cool.

[Buster]

This was pretty exciting...I've been tracking the progress of the project for about the last 5 years or something. ( listen to a lot of cosmology and physics podcasts).

They should just hand these guys the nobel prize right now.

[ZenOps]

So. It is flat right?

[D'z Nutz]

This is so awesome.

What's really exciting is years from now we'll look back at this and laugh at how "simple" this accomplishment was cause scientists will be photographing them more frequently and with better results. I remember when they first announced they discovered exoplanets and now they've found thousands of them.

[Buster]

This is so awesome.

What's really exciting is years from now we'll look back at this and laugh at how "simple" this accomplishment was cause scientists will be photographing them more frequently and with better results. I remember when they first announced they discovered exoplanets and now they've found thousands of them.

I don't think so. This is vastly more complicated than what kepler was doing...and imo a much bigger deal than the exoplanet discoveries.

There also are fewer candidate black holes for us to look at.

[tonytiger55]

This is amazing. This is huge for science.

[Gman.45]

So awesome. I'm really interested to see what they bring us regarding black holes in our own galaxy next.

Anyone else going to watch the Israeli drone moon landing tomorrow afternoon? It's broadcasting live Thursday early afternoon sometime online.

[Buster]

So awesome. I'm really interested to see what they bring us regarding black holes in our own galaxy next.

Anyone else going to watch the Israeli drone moon landing tomorrow afternoon? It's broadcasting live Thursday early afternoon sometime online.

The only black hole in our galaxy that we can look at is the supermassive on at the centre...SagA*.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[Buster]

I actually thought this was known? It isn't known?

I've read that the light surrounding the black hole is created from the massive friction generated by particles being crushed together at different velocities while they spiral in a decaying orbit into it


Also that they suspect that Quasars are actually just super massive black holes that are creating so much friction by orbiting mass that it fountains energy out of them

The accretion disk is caused by the plasma created by infalling gas and dust into the BH. Things don't fall straight in, for the most part, they spiral at nearly the speed of light. The actual photons that are arriving at your eye can be directly radiated from this accretion disk, or they can be photons that have "wrapped" around the BH either directly or after a half an orbit. To say no one knows is a bit weird, since almost ALL of this was predicted by Einstein's equations.

[CompletelyNumb]

So black holes are donuts.

[JRSC00LUDE]

So black holes are donuts.

That explains why they make all these people gonuts.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[Gman.45]

The only black hole in our galaxy that we can look at is the supermassive on at the centre...SagA*.

I see, I didn't know that there was just one they could observe like this - going to be interesting to see this one regardless.


The accretion disk is caused by the plasma created by infalling gas and dust into the BH. Things don't fall straight in, for the most part, they spiral at nearly the speed of light. The actual photons that are arriving at your eye can be directly radiated from this accretion disk, or they can be photons that have "wrapped" around the BH either directly or after a half an orbit. To say no one knows is a bit weird, since almost ALL of this was predicted by Einstein's equations.

So is it just the matter/gas/etc being pulled in by the gravity of the black hole at the accretion disk reflecting light from another source/star, or is it creating light we can observe in these pics itself by some other phenomenon or method?

Buster, are you into telescopes/observing things yourself in addition to all your knowledge regarding this? If so, I've been considering getting a really good scope/camera setup to do some backyard type stuff with, and could use help/advice.

Einstein was truly incredible, I've read a number of books about him recently, and a bunch of his own letters and writings. He had a son that was schizophrenic and had many other mental problems, hard to believe that in one generation's separation you can have one of the most brilliant men on earth, and his one son ending up having a lot of mental issues. His other son was a pretty brilliant scientist too. Anyhow, Einstein has been proven right - again. His theory of general relativity has been proven correct twice now in the past few years. Incredible that without all the tech we have today, he could have so accurately predicted spacetime and gravity they way he did.

I find the 5,000 terabytes of data that this image took to be a real mindfck as well. Such interesting and incredible thing happening now.

[Buster]

Most black holes are 100 solar masses or less. M87 in the pictures was 6.5 billion solar masses, and SagA* is around 4 and a half million solar masses (or thereabouts). The event horizon of a black hole is proportional to its mass, so any other observable black hole would need to be that proportional distance closer to us. It's possible, but I'm not sure how we can identify them. We could only prove that SagA* existed because we saw stars whipping around a piece of empty space at ridiculous speeds. Also, I presume smaller black holes would either have no accretion disks, or dim ones.

Also we're not looking at "light", we're looking at radio waves...but not really an important distinction. I'm not certain of this, but I don't think we could observer ANYTHING with visible light in the area. They needed to use radio waves because those can penetrate the physical barriers that would otherwise obscure the area. The radio waves are created by the accretion disk itself. The accretion disk is super-high energy particles blasting EMR in every direction. The pattern of the black hole image is the radiation from the accretion disk being warped towards us by the intense gravity. It's not a reflection. It's actual photons traveling around a highly curved bit of spacetime and then "escaping" to a flatter piece of spacetime and making their way to us. (The photons themselves would perceive their travel to be in a straight line, by the way, they are just travelling through curved space-time. One of the fun things about this observation is that we are looking at the limits of general relativity. Our normal lives don't really expose us to anything but more "conventional" aspects of relativity. But when you look at that image, it's not just accretion disks and donut holes - it's actual spacetime getting up to absolute fuckery. And you're looking at it. Amazing. The closest we get to any truly relativistic conditions is the adjustments our GPS satellites have to make to their internal clock speeds to account for their high velocity changing the rate at which they experience time.)

There would also be some light from behind the black hole getting "lensed" around it , creating an additional ring of photons that have arrived at the black hole from other stars.

I don't really find it all that intriguing to look up at the stars. Anything that I can observe in a telescope from my backyard I can see much better with google image searches..ha.

As for Einstein: we actually KNOW that he is wrong. Or at least incomplete. General Relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics (and vice versa). And basically all of modern physics is in one way or the other an attempt to determine what happens when Einstein's theories stop and quantum mechanics starts. I hope it happens in our lifetimes, but I'm not hopeful. At some point we will do some math, or observe some phenomena that are not explainable by General Relativity. But we keep on doing more extreme experiments and they still fall within the bounds of GR: LIGO detecting gravity waves, and now the observation of a black hole. I think many scientists were hoping there would be a surprise out of this observation because it might provide some insight. (It's likely that black holes and their event horizons are one of the places where the gap between GR and quantum mechanics might be most distinct.)

Einstein was even more amazing than we give him credit for. He made some assumptions that were outlandish, but was smart enough to work through them (and all of the wacky implications) within a lifetime. But he still had to make those leaps of faith, which require years to validate. I don't think even he knows why he made those assumptions and worked through the math.

[Misterman]

Seems to be a lot of excitement online about this. But I haven't seen any mention of what the actual repercussions are of this? What do we expect to learn from it? What potential theories does this help support?

[Gman.45]

Great post Buster, I could talk and listen to this subject for hours. Any recommendations for good physics/astrophysics podcasts?

Heh, a lot for me to unpack in just that single post, I'm going to be Googling and reading all day about this now.

Is there any relationship between Einstein's theory of special relatively, and what you're describing regarding general relativity?

I enjoy reading things about where science and scientific theories end, and supposition begins right now, sort of what you were describing regarding where Einstein's theories and models end and new ideas and theories are beginning. Want more.

[tonytiger55]

Great post Buster, I could talk and listen to this subject for hours. Any recommendations for good physics/astrophysics podcasts?

+1

I was going to ask earlier too. I'd be interested in any recommendations to any podcasts. Ive been watching quite a few videos on Tube of the You in regards to astrophysics and cosmology over the last year.

[Buster]

The PBS Youtube Channel "Spacetime" is great. Start there.

Podcasts:

anything by Sean Carroll if you want. He's been a guest on Joe rogan, and has his own.

Paul Sutter's podcasts are awesome.

Ask a Spaceman and SpaceRadio.

All of the above have a lot of content built up over years, so start at the beginning.

Wikipedia is a great resource as well. The awesome thing about this subject is you can decide how much you want to dig down into details and the technical aspects. The biggest problem you will run into is that some of the concepts cannot be understood intuitively, but only mathematically. You can see the math, and it makes sense, but when you try to apply it to things that we can see and feel it doesn't make sense. So at some point you're not dealing with "cool shit" you're jsut dealing with "cool mathematics".

Special relativity came before GR obviously, and the two are inter-related. SR basically establishes that light is a constant (and all of the crazy shit that implies). But it essentially contemplates spacetime as a flat grid.

GR was big because it establishes that spacetime is not flat, but rather curved. Moreover it establishes that gravity isn't a force, but simply a reflection of that curvature. But Einstein had to make some assumptions to to make this work: like Equivalence which states that mass/gravity and inertia are basically the same thing (probably poor phrasing). And also that energy and mass are the same thing. Obviously more to it.

[Gman.45]

Great, thanks Buster. Going to be some pretty great threads on here in the future regarding this subject (I hope).

On another note, the Israeli moon probe landing previously mentioned went down this aft. Literally. They lost the vehicle, which SUCKS, but apparently they gathered a lot of data about what went wrong, and they are planning to try again in 2020 or 2021. Great times we're living in. As Buster alluded to, I don't think our generation will live to see certain things I'd love to be present for, which sucks even more. Still, the next 30 or 40 years will bring some pretty amazing things.

[Buster]

On the topic of the pictures...one thing I didn't get is what NEW science they were expecting from this. It was important to verify our expectations with respect to black holes, and this is the firmest confirmation we will ever get. All previous observations were more indirect.

Still - I know that they are planning on making regular observations of M87 to see if it changes, and on what timeline. Like LIGO, I hope that the validation of the experimental technique might be the biggest gain here. It makes it easier to justify funding for larger scale projects. I hope they fund LISA for instance as an upgrade to LIGO. The LIGO stuff might have been even more exciting for me, since it actually creates a band new way for us to observe the universe, which we never had before (gravitational waves). I wonder if a space based version of Event Horizon would be possible. Launching an array of radio telescopes into space which can be further apart and so have higher resolution.

[Gman.45]

I was surprised to read that it was a 29 year old whose grad work and algorithm largely allowed the new method(s) for creating this black hole image. Katie Bouman created this algo while at Cal Tech.

https://twitter.com/MIT_CSAIL

[Buster]

I was surprised to read that it was a 29 year old whose grad work and algorithm largely allowed the new method(s) for creating this black hole image. Katie Bouman created this algo while at Cal Tech.

https://twitter.com/MIT_CSAIL

Ya, she did a decent Ted talk a couple of years ago. She looks like she's 12.


Watching Shep's interviews from a few years ago was also interesting. These guys have been doing this work for YEARS in basically obscurity, things started to pick up a couple of years ago. And now they get Nobel prizes.

[Xtrema]

Seems to be a lot of excitement online about this. But I haven't seen any mention of what the actual repercussions are of this? What do we expect to learn from it? What potential theories does this help support?

Basically a visual confirmation of what we have theorized since Einstein days.

End of the day, this is a great promotion of what good science is.

[ZenOps]

Can't have a doughnut hole without a doughnut.

[dirtsniffer]

I thought this thread was going to be about government spending

[tonytiger55]

Ya, she did a decent Ted talk a couple of years ago. She looks like she's 12.

I thought you were joking.
I just watched the Ted Talk. Holy shit, she does look like she is 12.
Really impressive how she put it all together.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs&t=604s

[Buster]

I guess this could go here?

This is one of the best visualizations I've seen yet of general relativity. Well worth the watch.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc