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Astronomers may soon have the first picture of a black hole
- kseistrup 10y agoPics, or it didn't happen!
- gjkood 10y ago> But that sense of relief is tinged with anticipation: So much data takes time to process, and the team must wait months to find out if their massive effort was truly a success. It could be a few months before something comes out. I have the same sentiment that you expressed. Eagerly awaiting pics. What wonderful times we live in.
- ourmandave 10y ago...the team must wait months to find out... This is like previews to a Pixar movie.
- gjkood 10y agoEven more delay... > The hard drives from the South Pole telescope can’t be flown out until the end of the winter season there at the end of October. The picture will be incomplete till end of October plus associated processing delays.
- roywiggins 10y agoNow that's some latency
- helthanatos 10y agoI can't wait for pictures. They will become my new desktop background.
- keketi 10y agoThe picture is going to be a completely black rectangle.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoBlack holes aren't necessarily dark. In fact, they usually emit a lot of light, especially in the x-ray spectrum. https://www.sciencealert.com/visible-light-emitted-from-a-black-hole-has-been-detected-for-the-first-time https://www.sciencealert.com/visible-light-emitted-from-a-bl...
- Y_Y 10y agoThat's not what's in the article. The object falling into the black hole might emit a lot of light, but black holes can't emit from within, and Hawking radiation is very weak.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoIt's not the Hawking radiation, it's the friction caused by the gravitational forces (also thought to include magnetic fields) compressing and superheating the matter, which in turn causes it to emit light. It's apparently thought that the hole doesn't just immediately swallow up matter whole, and that it's not easy for matter to enter the hole at all. Rather the matter is sort of captured and slowly ground down by friction, leaving an accretion disc surrounding the event horizon. Black holes also emit "x-ray jets" that are thought to be observable. That said, I'm not a physicist. This is just what I've gleaned from articles and Horizon documentaries.
- Y_Y 10y agoBut I am a physicist, who works in this field. I know people in the article personally. You can't become an expert by watching documentaries, even though they thrive on making people feel like that. It's my personal opinion that popular science articles on new research (like this one), are ultimately unhelpful and are just an excuse for us to get funding. All that said it's great to see people interested in high-energy astro. If you wanted to know more I'd recommend Longair[0], even though it would be tough going for a non-scientist. [0] https://www.amazon.com/High-Energy-Astrophysics-Malcolm-Longair/dp/0521756189 https://www.amazon.com/High-Energy-Astrophysics-Malcolm-Long...
- graycat 10y ago"It's like the love life of an elephant: Lots of loud noises, passion, drama, and then nothing to see for 22 months."
- viola11 10y agoI think it went well? For an article essentially about the data taking it was surprisingly vague on how the actual observation went...
- goodcanadian 10y agoFrom the point of view that the data was successfully collected, yes, it sounds like it went well. Actual data analysis will take some time. I imagine it will be published in Nature which means that the results may be embargoed for a few more months after data analysis is complete. I'd say that we might hear something in 1.5-2 years.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoA slightly better explanation: https://www.universetoday.com/134996/black-hole-imaged-first-time-event-horizon-telescope/# https://www.universetoday.com/134996/black-hole-imaged-first...
- codezero 10y agoThey won't have the data processed until later this year, there is no picture right now.
- covercash 10y ago> The hard drives from the South Pole telescope can’t be flown out until the end of the winter season there at the end of October. Yeah, it'll be a while.
- wand3r 10y agoPretty wild we potentially have technology to photograph a black hole and accumulate 1024 HDDs of data pertaining to something light years away but not have the tech to transmit them electronically on our planet.
- simcop2387 10y agoWe have the tech, it's just not economically feasible to do it. They do have satellite communication access but it's lower bandwidth and only available during part of the day due to the way polar orbits work.
- melling 10y agoIt says it's equal of 10,000 laptops. We probably don't have a general need for that in the South Pole, so no one paid for it to be installed.
- edge17 10y agoWhat's 1 laptop unit? From what I can gather 7PB/10000 = 700GB, so 1 laptop is 700GB?
- em3rgent0rdr 10y agoWhat a misleading title
- davesque 10y agoKinda click-baity title. There's nothing new here. They still need to process the collected data to get an actual image. Also, it has started to bother me the way that popular science articles overly dramatize things. For example, the description of waiting for good weather as "nerve-racking." I almost laughed out loud when I read this trying to imagine the action-movie-like intensity they were attributing to what was probably a predicted and fairly routine part of the project.
- privong 10y ago> trying to imagine the action-movie-like intensity they were attributing to what was probably a predicted and fairly routine part of the project. As someone who is one step removed from the EHT project (several friends/colleagues of mine were up at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array [ALMA] assisting with the data-collection), these types of observations are not routine at all. This was part of a special campaign, coordinated between major observatories across the world. In order to ensure the data are useful, the precision of the calibration and timing is typically in excess of what the observatories do normally as part of their day-to-day operations. So while the observing campaign was set up well in advance, it is certainly not a routine part of operations. Regarding the title, it's a little bit click-bait-y, but it's also true that we don't know if there will be an image of the black hole (shadow). The data are not yet in their final form; even the cross-correlation between observatories (necessary to resolve the approximate size of the black hole's shadow) haven't yet been done. So it's entirely possible (though perhaps unlikely) the data that were acquired end up being unsuitable for making an image of the black hole (shadow).
- davesque 10y ago> these types of observations are not routine at all. Perhaps you think I was saying that the EHT project as a whole is uninteresting. I wasn't suggesting this at all. I understand that this project calls for a novel type of data collection that requires more coordination, etc. My opinion was that the author's use of certain wordings made things sound more dramatic than they actually were. I imagine that the possibility of bad weather would have been foreseen and planned for (i.e. routine). > it's a little bit click-bait-y, but it's also true that we don't know if there will be an image of the black hole (shadow). This was my point. We still don't know. But, in my opinion, the wording of the title (which is now different than the link text) sort of suggested that we do know.
- cspags 10y ago"The telescope zeroed in on two supermassive black holes: a beast as massive as four million suns". It's incredible thinking about how tiny and insignificant our planet is compared to the rest of the cosmos.
- duetosymmetry 10y agoThat's the one in our galaxy, and the other target—in the galaxy M87—is around 5 billion times the mass of the sun!
- graycat 10y agoMy first cut guess is that at each telescope at each relevant point in time, they need to capture both the intensity and the phase of the sub-millimeter wave electro-magnetic signal and, then, for each point in time add those signals. So, (1) How do they get the time points coordinated just right among all the telescopes? (2) How do they capture both the amplitude and the phase of the signals? Gee, maybe readers are not supposed to ask such questions?
- wl 10y ago(1) Atomic clocks. (2) They mix the bands of interest down to intermediate frequencies that can be readily digitized. It's the same old superheterodyne principle we've used for the last century or so.
- graycat 10y agoSuper! Thanks! I wondered how they would get an analog to digital converter to work a sub-millimeter frequencies. So, right, they don't!
- killjoywashere 10y agoI saw one of these guys, Shep Doeleman, talk last year. What they do for this is nuts. They have to transport an atomic clock with them to each site, and something like a 20 of the biggest helium-filled disks available in a custom machine to each site (which is somewhere crazy, like the South Pole, the top of a mountain in Chile, a volcano, etc). And run them all at the exact same time. They end up with something like 7 PB of data and process it all down to like a 10 MB image. They then throw the rest of the data away because they can't afford the disk space for storage. I think they have serious plans for putting a constellation of satellites around a Lagrange point.
- serg_chernata 10y agoIs there a video or audio of this talk somewhere? Sounds fascinating.
- duetosymmetry 10y agoI believe every radio telescope has their own reference clock that lives at the site. The EHT team is not responsible for schlepping these clocks around. There are other reasons besides VLBI to have really good timing at the site—for example, pulsar timing.
- killjoywashere 10y agoI think there was a question about that: they had some issues with two different standards and decided it was better to pick one type and use that at all locations even if they had to bring it up themselves.
- groestl 10y agoFunny, just a few days ago I watched a TEDx talk about this by a computer scientist on the team. Maybe you enjoy it as well: https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hol...
- Entangled 10y agoIs there a slight chance that they are not "holes" but massive vantablack spheres?
- whorleater 10y agoThe project's page is: http://eventhorizontelescope.org/ http://eventhorizontelescope.org/