6 ms·

> 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 wa

• ourmandave 10y ago
  ...the team must wait months to find out... This is like previews to a Pixar movie.
  • gjkood 10y ago
    Even 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 ago
      Now that's some latency
• helthanatos 10y ago
  I can't wait for pictures. They will become my new desktop background.
  • keketi 10y ago
    The picture is going to be a completely black rectangle.
    • lobster_johnson 10y ago
      Black 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 ago
        That'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 ago
          It'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 ago
            But 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...
            • lobster_johnson 10y ago
              I went back to the article, which does say more or less what I wrote: What astronomers hope to finally see when they add up all the signals is a halo of light surrounding a dark circle -- the shadow of the black hole. The crescent of light comes from luminous gases, heated to hundreds of billions of degrees, that orbit just outside the black hole, tracing the region just beyond the event horizon. So when the grandparent said, "a completely black rectangle", that's probably not true. Which is was what I was responding to. Please feel to correct us non-experts (but it's not terribly useful to shut down discussion without explanation other than "I am a physicist").
    • gjkood 10y ago
      > What astronomers hope to finally see when they add up all the signals is a halo of light surrounding a dark circle—the shadow of the black hole. The crescent of light comes from luminous gases, heated to hundreds of billions of degrees, that orbit just outside the black hole, tracing the region just beyond the event horizon. Probably some sort of ring image captured from the side or something like the artist's rendering in the article maybe.
• 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."