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First Image of Black Hole

Khaos said:
6.5B solar masses. Interestingly that makes the sphere under the event horizon less dense than the sun itself.

Obviously, that doesn't make any sense since the mass should be in a singularity at the centre of that sphere; this is just to draw attention on the fact that the sphere covered by the event horizon isn't the singularity.
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The article states that the black hole has billions of times the mass of our sun.

Edit: Sorry, read 6.5B and 6.58. . . .
 
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Alright, I don't know about you guys but I'm pretty sure that black hole picture is a blurred picture of the dark sign.
On a side note: if this picture is true, the color red is the most visible color in the universe (for now). Sorry green, you lost your crown as the most visible color.
 
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LordRageKnight said:
Alright, I don't know about you guys but I'm pretty sure that black hole picture is a blurred picture of the dark sign.
On a side note: if this picture is true, the color red is the most visible color in the universe (for now). Sorry green, you lost your crown as the most visible color.
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You aren't the first one.



As for the color. The image was taken in radio light so it is the color of radio waves. Really any color could have been used but red was a very appropriate choice.
 
LordRageKnight said:
On a side note: if this picture is true, the color red is the most visible color in the universe (for now). Sorry green, you lost your crown as the most visible color.
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It's not true color, they took a radio spectrum image, since that is more tollerant for inferomitry (you only need absurdly precise measurements and timing, and because that passes better through the dust clouds. To do the same with visible light... well it is pretty literally millions of times harder since the wavelength of the light determines how precise the time and the location of the telescope need to be known. Work with multi- milimeter scale radio waves and you can be off by a milimeter and your clock off by the amount of time it takes light to cross a millimeter and it will work. Visible light is in the 100's of nanometers though... so your measurements need to be a lot more accurate. In general in infertometry you can be off by half the wavelength without much issue which is why past inferometry experiments involved multi-meter long radio waves. Those leave a lot more room to be sloppy.
 
As far as I understand, the image is red because it is a heatmap made by radiotelescopes.

Edit: ninjas everywhere.
 
Catty Nebulart said:
It's not true color, they took a radio spectrum image, since that is more tollerant for inferomitry (you only need absurdly precise measurements and timing, and because that passes better through the dust clouds. To do the same with visible light... well it is pretty literally millions of times harder since the wavelength of the light determines how precise the time and the location of the telescope need to be known. Work with multi- milimeter scale radio waves and you can be off by a milimeter and your clock off by the amount of time it takes light to cross a millimeter and it will work. Visible light is in the 100's of nanometers though... so your measurements need to be a lot more accurate. In general in infertometry you can be off by half the wavelength without much issue which is why past inferometry experiments involved multi-meter long radio waves. Those leave a lot more room to be sloppy.
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I mean 'true color' is often a bit of a fiction in consumer digital cameras much less on telescopes. Trying to replicate what a human eye would see is always more an art then a science as few people have eyes the size of telescope dishes that can stare for hours at a single point.
 


Black Hole Sensei is Sag A*.
This is Black Hole Senseis Cousin.
(And of course Earth-Chan is a voyeur.)

Edit more serious edit

 
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Skelm said:
There were about 200 people working on this. I'm sure she made some significant contributions, but talking like it's primarily her work (or any single person's) is silly, especially since this project started when she was 16.
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Digging a little bit, I found an explanation from one of Dr. Bouman's coworkers, Andrew Chael:

Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries . . . While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and / the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data. With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper; / as a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of radio interferometry.
Andrew Chael said:
(1/7) So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library (https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging …) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop.
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Andrew Chael said:
(2/7) Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries (including one developed by my friend @sparse_k). While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and
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Andrew Chael said:
(3/7) the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data. With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85 …);
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Andrew Chael said:
(4/7) as a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of radio interferometry. I'm thrilled Katie is getting recognition for her work and that she's inspiring people as an example of women's leadership in STEM. I'm also thrilled she's pointing
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Andrew Chael said:
(5/7) out that this was a team effort including contributions from many junior scientists, including many women junior scientists (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10213326021042929&set=a.10211451091290857&type=3&theater …). Together, we all make each other's work better; the number of commits doesn't tell the full story of who was indispensable.
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Andrew Chael said:
(6/7) So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life. Otherwise, stick around -- I hope to start tweeting
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Andrew Chael said:
(7/7) more about black holes and other subjects I am passionate about -- including space, being a gay astronomer, Ursula K. Le Guin, architecture, and musicals. Thanks for following me, and let me know if you have any questions about the EHT!
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EDIT: converted the quote to a block quote format
 
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Skelm said:
There were about 200 people working on this. I'm sure she made some significant contributions, but talking like it's primarily her work (or any single person's) is silly, especially since this project started when she was 16.
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Thank you! It's a global effort, involving lots of people and observatories around the world but nooooo, our individualist culture has to point someone and say "there. they did it." like the Great Men (well, women I guess in that case) theory of anything is anywhere close to being true.
 
Vyslanté said:
Thank you! It's a global effort, involving lots of people and observatories around the world but nooooo, our individualist culture has to point someone and say "there. they did it." like the Great Men (well, women I guess in that case) theory of anything is anywhere close to being true.
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Sure, of course, but it's actually really important to visibly have women doing well in science – and especially computer science – as role models to show that it's not just a Man's World in there. For an example of the sort of thing we really should aim to avoid, Donna Strickland was deemed insufficiently notable to have a Wikipedia article until after she won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year (in contrast to the man she shared the award with).

Plus, Dr Bouman is so elated in that photograph that it's actually contagious!
 
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