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First Image of Black Hole

Gravitas Hunt said:
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.
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Sure, but it's also important not to exaggerate their success, partly because otherwise people who notice will conclude that women's contributions are exaggerated for effect, but also to avoid misleading women considering going into science as to the possible significance of their actions. Being *the* person responsible for something like this is unlikely bordering on impossible, but being one significant contributor among many is possible. I certainly wouldn't have any complaints about a photo of the team, including Dr Bouman.
 
I supposed theoretically that men were part of this operation in some capacity. But I don't see any evidence for that.
 
I love all the memes and fanarts about Black Hole-chan that keep appearing on reddit.
 
Skelm said:
Sure, but it's also important not to exaggerate their success, partly because otherwise people who notice will conclude that women's contributions are exaggerated for effect, but also to avoid misleading women considering going into science as to the possible significance of their actions. Being *the* person responsible for something like this is unlikely bordering on impossible, but being one significant contributor among many is possible. I certainly wouldn't have any complaints about a photo of the team, including Dr Bouman.
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This may shock you, but by the time a little girl has grown up and entered education so as to shape her career around contributing to a highly specialised field, she probably has a very good idea of the scale and importance of any one person's contributions in the average large scale effort.

We don't need this kind of "help". It is at best rather condescending, and at worst the kind of concern-concealed "correction" beloved of those who want to "keep things in perspective" by diminishing the social and technical achievements of a political minority group to their "proper scale".

Not a good look.

(also the kind of people who like to go with the second conclude that women's contributions to any field are exaggerated on the basis of no evidence anyway, so who cares about them)
 
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Claudette Savagely said:
This may shock you, but by the time a little girl has grown up and entered education so as to shape her career around contributing to a highly specialised field, she probably has a very good idea of the scale and importance of any one person's contributions in the average large scale effort.
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I'm sure no one finishes a PhD under any illusions about how academia works, and even if they were it would be too late to change their mind, but when they consider starting on the path, their decision will be made partly on popular depictions of the end result. Indeed, this is the entire premise behind showing off minority representation. If women aren't making career decisions because of media representation of women in science, what was the point of all the articles and stories depicting them?

(My complaint is that I don't like the media blatantly twisting the truth in service of a convenient narrative, regardless of the practical consequences, but I don't imagine you would find that compelling)
 
Reveen said:
I'm eagerly waiting for the data for Sag A* to come out because I want to do a virgin/chad meme with the two of them.
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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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Yeah, for perspective this thing has about 1600 times the mass of the Sagittarius A* (which has 4 million solar masses); M87's supermassive black hole makes ours look like a little minnow by comparison, never mind that Sagittarius A* is probably by far the biggest single object in our galaxy (I dunno, maybe some nebulae rival it, I'm pretty sure nothing else would come within two orders of magnitude of it; the biggest star in the neighborhood of our galaxy is RMC 136a1 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is "only" 300 solar masses).

Really puts the scale of this object on perspective.

TheLordofAwesome said:
Alright, so is there a planet orbiting it and does that planet have Satan on it?
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I wonder what the sky would look like from a planet orbiting near the accretion disk of this thing. I imagine it might be spectacular.

Probably best enjoyed in a radiation-resistant transhuman robot body.
 
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Memphet'ran said:
Yeah, for perspective this thing has about 1600 times the mass of the Sagittarius A* (which has 4 million solar masses); M87's supermassive black hole makes ours look like a little minnow by comparison, never mind that Sagittarius A* is probably by far the biggest single object in our galaxy (I dunno, maybe some nebulae rival it, I'm pretty sure nothing else would come within two orders of magnitude of it; the biggest star in the neighborhood of our galaxy is RMC 136a1 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is "only" 300 solar masses).

Really puts the scale of this object on perspective.

I wonder what the sky would look like from a planet orbiting near the accretion disk of this thing. I imagine it might be spectacular.

Probably best enjoyed in a radiation-resistant transhuman robot body.
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There are some globular clusters, that are almost or about as massive. Eg M54, FSR 1758, NGC 5139.

Most of these are suspected of being dwarf galaxies nucleus.

Also, of containing intermediate-mass black holes.
 
Skelm said:
I'm sure no one finishes a PhD under any illusions about how academia works, and even if they were it would be too late to change their mind, but when they consider starting on the path, their decision will be made partly on popular depictions of the end result. Indeed, this is the entire premise behind showing off minority representation. If women aren't making career decisions because of media representation of women in science, what was the point of all the articles and stories depicting them?

(My complaint is that I don't like the media blatantly twisting the truth in service of a convenient narrative, regardless of the practical consequences, but I don't imagine you would find that compelling)
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My man that looks rather passive aggressive.

Snidely implying I'm comfortable with "blatantly twisting the truth" to serve a "convenient narrative"? Using the notion of media representation to argue against properly acknowledging a particular woman's contribution because otherwise it might somehow lead to entrancing girls with unrealistic expectations? You even acknowledge that by the time they're adults they know the game, so why the lather?

Yikes.

On a totally unrelated notes, here's a reason why exhibiting and defending the contributions made by women in science (and society) are important:



Because there are plenty of people out there who see a lady doing important work alongside her many skilled colleagues, and who decide to propagate falsehoods about her in response.

Almost like a lot of people don't like it when women do stuff.
 
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How can we be in 2019 and that is still a fact. . .What am I kidding, we are disgusting human beings.
 
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