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Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_r
by piker 8y ago
Higher resolution official release seems to be: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...
- hliyan 8y agoThe additional pixel density probably doesn't add any details though. The original image looks like a smoothed-out version of a low-res image anyway...
- hrdwdmrbl 8y agoDoes that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?
- luizfzs 8y agoRelieved it isn't just me
- geoah 8y agoI get it if I move a bit when on an angle, I assume it's just my crappy monitor's viewing angles causing it.
- chki 8y agoYes, fascinating! If you shift the focus of your eyes from the outside to the inside of the hole, it seems to "pulsate"
- pcmaffey 8y agoYes, reminds me of the Eye of Sauron.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- manaskarekar 8y agoFunnily, it reminds me of Soundgarden's album, Superunknown, which had the famous song 'Black Hole Sun.' https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown-Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8U https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown-Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8...
- EForEndeavour 8y agoThe supreme astronomical example of the Eye of Sauron is this Hubble shot of the star Fomalhaut and its debris disk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomalhaut#/media/File:Fomalhaut_B_entire-Hubble_Telescope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomalhaut#/media/File:Fomalhau...
- thanatropism 8y agoIt's the color scheme. I think in matplotlib it's called "hot". I do a lot of 2D kernel density plots that by having a black zero level and dozens of contour levels produce a smooth look with aesthetics similarities to this. I used to use that scheme because "heatmaps" but stopped because of the pulsing illusion. I'm not sure if this image is real color or just lightness value and they used a color scheme for drama.
- 317070 8y agoIt's the latter. This is an image in radio-frequency brightness of the object, so not visible frequencies of light. But yeah, it also looks like the 'hot' colormap to me.
- Mizza 8y agoGrrr, why aren't scientists all using perceptually uniforms color schemes! This would still look awesome in `plasma`. Is there any where I can get the data and do it myself? One of my favorite talks ever is on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
- kardos 8y agoCan you run it through the colormap in reverse to (approximately) recover the data?
- yehar 8y agoBased on my analysis the published image is too processed to be able to invert the colormap to get to the brightness temperature data. I had better luck with Paper IV Fig. 15. See: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/472641/what-would-the-event-horizon-telescope-m87-black-hole-image-look-like-if-we-saw https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/472641/what-woul...
- thanatropism 8y agoTechnically yes -- colormaps are 1-dimensional non-self intersecting curves in RGBA space. You just grab them by the... I mean just straighten them. I don't know if an explicit formula for the colormap is given, but you can always do "xs = np.linspace(0,1,100); ys = { cm.hot(x):x for x in xs}" and recover an approximate inverse. Then apply this function to each pixel of the image.
- tacone 8y agoSome time ago I've seen a picture over the Internet where the description said the more you see it "moving" the more likely you're stressed. As for the black hole, looking it at full screen I see it pulsating a little.
- Tor3 8y agoI don't even have to move my eyes, I stare at it and it's constantly moving away from me. I had to check that it's not actually a movie. Strangest thing.
- Insanity 8y agoIt does look like it pulsates to me! That's an interesting illusion :)
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoYou mean to tell me this is not a gif?!
- hrdwdmrbl 8y agoI literally did double-check the file extension
- dreamcompiler 8y agoInteresting that so many people see this but for me it's absolutely static.
- sametmax 8y agoIf you are focused and calm, or have bad sight, you won't see it naturally. To force it, move your focus from 1cm to the left, then right, again and again, quickly.
- simias 8y agoI suspect this is because it's extremely blurry, if you watch it on a large screen it might trick your eye into trying to refocus, obviously without success.
- bparsons 8y agoI think my eye is trying to bring it into focus. It is like when the camera on your phone can't quite figure out what it is looking it and keeps adjusting.
- banehoodie 8y agolooks like the image data was cleaned up with bicubic interpolation, or something of the like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation
- neom 8y agoStare at it till there are two, then have fun snapping them in and out.
- agumonkey 8y agomoving the picture on my screen caused some eye bug
- kyllo 8y agoYes, and I also see a spot in the shape of it after looking away, though that may just mean my monitor is too bright
- anonytrary 8y agoYes if you dance your focus around the image, it appears to pulsate. Probably your pupils constricting and dilating due to the high contrast in the image.
- asdfasdfasdfa 8y ago"High res"
- nabnob 8y agoIs this link down for anyone else?
- LoSboccacc 8y agothe original tiff is 7416x4320 it's still too many pixel, it can be a fifth of that while conveying the same amount of information. I'm puzzled by this, if each of those pixel is actually captured by the lenses, why is it all this much uniform? was it smoothed or does this suggest that it's actually a gigantic uniform cloud of gas? haven't seen the whole video of the release, I'll have to catch up later in the evening, but this really seems to have captured way too much compared to the actual lens resolution and I wonder what would be the "confidence interval" or astrophysical equivalent on each of those pixels.
- petschge 8y agoThe picture is not captured by lenses, or an optical telescope at all. It is created by inverting the data received at eight radio telescopes (or eighty individual dishes) around the world. And the smoothing is just due to the inherent limit in the resolving power of the telescope array. The impressive bit is that we see more than a single bright dot.
- princekolt 8y agoThere is no lens. This was done using eight radio telescopes (or arrays) around the globe to create a "virtual" radio telescope which is effectively the size of the earth. After that the data of the individual telescopes was processed to produce an image. There is some more info in the wikipedia article for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
- joering2 8y agoThanks for the link. More reading reveals the amount of data produced goes into Petabytes. You can't just upload it to drop box or push it via FTP; hence correct icon of an airplane because those drives with data are indeed delivered by regular means of transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#/media/File:EHT-infography.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#/media...
- theWheez 8y ago
- nprz 8y agowhoever took this picture should be fired, it's way out of focus!
- hathym 8y agoSo how much this picture cost ?
- fabricexpert 8y ago$40m So basically nothing in the grand scheme of anything.
- coldpie 8y agoI've taken to measuring moderately large amounts of money in "juiceros". Forty million dollars is one third of a juicero.
- acqq 8y agoThat's half the cost of a single F-35 fighter plane. Just US alone will pay for around 2500 of them (2010 estimate), and plans to pay around 4 times more than that to maintain them. So just F-35 total costs for US are equivalent to 25000 scientific projects like this one. To compare, it would be one new project like this every day for 70 years! This specific project is more European or even a world project than just US, if I understood correctly.
- imtringued 8y agoIt makes sense to compare the costs to a single plane but to the whole fleet is just stupid. You can't defend a country with scientific projects. The thing is every time someone proposes the idea to slash the military budget to fund something else there are at least a hundred other people with a different idea on what to use the funds on. If the funds were spread over so many different projects you end up with an insignificant sum in each of them. Spending the money on military might be actually be advantageous because of large investments in new military technology end up benefiting the civilian sector. (Isn't that the point of the F-35?)
- acqq 8y agoIt’s the opposite: most of the military money goes to the stuff which, if actually used, ends the human civilisation as we know it. The same goals that US has could be achieved with orders of magnitude less military spending, while also reducing the risks for the whole humanity. So every alternative to the current practices is infinitely better.
- aepiepaey 8y agoThe article linking to that image: https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276 https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276
- aubricus 8y agoThanks for the source article! I had heard about this but not seen any material on it until now.
- lisper 8y agoAnd a really great explanation of why it looks the way it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
- localhostdotdev 8y agoediting that image reveals all kinds of details: https://imgur.com/a/TvQsgbA https://imgur.com/a/TvQsgbA (and I don't even know what I'm doing)
- vanderZwan 8y agoMind you, that's a JPG you are editing, so in the 8 bit sRGB color space. That means manipulations can lead to errors and illusions due to the color space being non-linear and clipped[0]. The original data was likely linear and at a much higher precision. If the source was a 16 bit linear grayscale PNG for example you could be much more assured you're not seeing the effects of JPG compression and things that were actually measured. EDIT: Found better sources: 16-bit sRGB PNG: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/files/eht/files/20190410-78m-4000x2330.png?m=1554877782 https://eventhorizontelescope.org/files/eht/files/20190410-7... 180 MiB original TIFF: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1907a/ https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1907a/ [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw
- localhostdotdev 8y agoThanks a lot for the explanation and the better sources, the TIFF image should probably be a torrent because it's not downloading very fast, the PNG image does give much nicer renders: https://i.imgur.com/zZcD5Na.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zZcD5Na.jpg
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y agoThose 'details' aren't real. The image is the result of a complex interpolation algorithm that takes very noisy and incomplete data as its input. The resolution is quite limited.
- PavlikPaja 8y agoI do (I think...) the bands are atifacts: https://imgur.com/a/dhN9Pf9 https://imgur.com/a/dhN9Pf9
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]