Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1].<p>TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>
Higher resolution official release seems to be: <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...</a>
Related video, made by Veritasium yesterday, is one of my favorite videos in a long time. He explained how the prediction of this image was made (before the image got released) and the video is great and fun to watch.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>
Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808</a><p>Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.<p>Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: <a href="https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M</a> — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)
International collaboration on scientific projects (International space station, CERN) always fills me with hope and optimism for humanity.<p>It's a nice contrast to opening the papers and reading the regular news, dominated by politics, with all the pessimism that creates.<p>Hooray for science.
The papers with the scientific details are here (open access):<p><a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E...</a><p>Article in physics world with comparisons to simulations:<p><a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unveiled-by-astronomers-in-landmark-discovery/" rel="nofollow">https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unve...</a><p>"AskScience" AMA on Reddit about the breakthrough:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_here_to/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscien...</a>
I am not trying to throw cold water on this, but I have some questions.<p>This ted talk has a very basic explanation of how they constructed this image. I was curious if anyone with image interpolation experience could weigh in on the method. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU</a><p>When she first starts explaining their method around 8:00m in, I was initially very skeptical of this result because she said that they feed images of what we "think" a black hole should look like and use algorithms to compare the captured data with those images.<p>She then goes into explaining the measure they take to keep the resulting image from being biased by passing environmental images and images of other astronomical anomaly to make sure that those images return similar results.<p>But I can't for the life of me figure out how passing non-stellar imagery could return something similar. And if it does, why do we need to feed it an example of what we think it should look like at all?
This 9 min video [0] does an excellent job explaining what we are looking at.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be</a>
The US unveiling is WAY better than the EU unveiling that is linked to above. They have images, animations and graphs that's easily understandable by the layperson, and it's scientists instead of politicians speaking.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk</a><p>They talk about how the image was produced, and how they made such a small image out of the 5 PetaByte of data they gathered from stations all over the world.
One of the cool things about this was that the data was too large to ship over the internet (in a reasonable amount of time). They actually shipped physical disks full of data.<p>Even today, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of disks...
"This is more realistic of the uncertainties involved in this high-end image reconstruction. Still amazing though! Fig. 4 in <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85</a> "<p><a href="https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/1115981369711058944" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/111598136971105894...</a>
For those wondering how the image was constructed: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE</a><p>Basically, the image has been constructed by calculations on massive measurement data-sets from multiple synchronized telescopes around the world.<p>So this isn't a "photo" in the normal sense. It's a reconstruction of many, many radio waves.
It doesn't sound like they just snapped a picture. The one guy says they used "supercomputers" for 6 months to get the image.<p>Sunspots look black relative to the rest of the sun but are actually very bright. Could this be the same thing? How did they set the black level? Is there a description of the procedure somewhere?<p>EDIT:<p>Found the paper describing the data processing:
<a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57</a>
I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?
Excellent example of successful international collaboration, with distributed team. Great results and promising future work: they say Sagitarius-A* is their next target!
The telescope's announcement is up, too: <a href="https://eventhorizontelescope.org/" rel="nofollow">https://eventhorizontelescope.org/</a>
So is a black hole 3 dimensional? Is it a sphere? Or does it only work in certain directions? Does everything "fall" the same direction?<p>I ask because even in a brief history of time, the diagrams are very "single plane of space-time, pulled infinitely deep by the black hole"
So much higher res than I thought (I was expecting a 3x3px black and white).<p>Does anyone know if this is aggregated over a long time so it's unlikely to improve with more observation? And what is limiting the resolution at this point?
Is this what we would see with the naked eye if we were close enough to the black hole? Or would we see nothing, because at this distance we would be dead (or the universe ended all around us)?
Why did they choose this very distant galaxy? why not something that's close to us like the andromeda galaxy or even the center of our own galaxy?
Is black hole a 3D object like a sun?
If so, I assume the light in the event horizon cover the whole object, i mean 3D shaped as well.
How the picture taken from the telescope shown the dark area where the black hole is located?
I mean, shouldn’t the whole black hole covered by the light thus we can’t see the black hole?
How big a VLBI baseline would they need to see much more detail? Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start.<p>Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.
Katie Bouman herself did a fascinating Ted Talk behind the effort involved for creating the first image of a black hole:<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hol...</a>
Does anybody noticed that there are two brighter areas (not just one) in bottom part of the image.<p>One at approx 8PM and one at approx 5-6PM (if seen as clock)
The image of the black hole is not sharp. Isn't it possible, that the optics at that distance may make "optical mistakes" and this is not a black hole after all but maybe just some circular lightning or some darker, but not black object before some star - like in solar eclipse?
The thought struck me that the interferometry technique used must have gathered data from a much wider field of view than of just the black hole.<p>Burried in that 5 petabytes of data is likely a scan of a much larger field of view at a similar resolution.
Here it is: <a href="https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild-ist-da.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild-ist...</a>
Here's the image via twitter:
<a href="https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328</a>
So how come it's a ring of plasma that forms and not a sphere? Like we can see the hole unobstructed? Is it because gravity tends to clump things together? I guess Saturn's rings are the same?
Here's an animated explanation of the process by the Event Horizon Telescope. <a href="https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE</a>
Let's say I were to jump into this black hole for fun. What happens to me? What are the chances I go somewhere cool, like another universe, versus getting turned into a spaghetti noodle?
I understand this was done by coordinating multiple telescopes to create a virtual earth size scope. Why is this not done more? It seems like cloud services would make this relatively easy to share bits technically. Are the issues mostly political or are there tech issues making this harder to do more often? Tangential question: if we can do this with an earth-size virtual scope, what could we do with a larger one? Scopes on earth/moon/Lagrange points synced together.
So how can we make a planet sized synthetic aperture optical telescope?<p>I'm wondering if there is a way to do it with holograms (since they preserve phase information): take holograms of the object from opposite sides of the earth and then combine them offline. There are some papers in this direction:<p><a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document" rel="nofollow">https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document</a><p>(spy satellites probably already do it...)
Can we see nearest stars and planets using this method? Or is it only for radio sources?<p>One day we may even connect millions of smartphones to observe various interesting space phenomena.
On a tangent, interesting closing remarks from the commissioner on the importance of courage, dreams and science.
Targeted towards the present anti-science climate.
Any word if Einstein's predictions are correct or refuted? There was word that if the shadow looked a certain way it could mean that relativity is incomplete.
Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.
Here's an article (and image) from the guardian: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1554901867" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-p...</a>
Why there are two live events right now? One is from Europe, another from US:<p>EU: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE</a><p>US: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M</a>
I wonder how it compares to the one from Interstellar?<p><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-true-black-hole-too-confusing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-t...</a>
Google Cache because site got stomped with traffic<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.eso.org/public/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...</a>
I have a real problem with this..<p>they have not taken a picture of a black hole because that is not possible..<p>they have at best constructed an image of some effects of a black hole.<p>This is where top scientists do damage to science for ordinary people when they make fundamental errors in public statements.
Anyone else getting sick of the media calling this the first "PHOTOGRAPH" of a black hole? It's a spectrograph at best and more realistically a rendering. Don't get me wrong it's really cool but it's not a photo.
If you want to jump directly to the image, here it is: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s</a>
Can the equipment used from several places on earth for this be deployed in space (may be to a geostationary orbit)? Not thinking about cost for a moment is this a far-fetched thought or such a thing is technically possible.
Katie Bouman's 2017 TED video explaining how the image was taken <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs</a>
Reminds me of this project (building a realistic blackhole raytracer) <a href="http://rantonels.github.io/starless" rel="nofollow">http://rantonels.github.io/starless</a>
This is fantastic. But why did it take so long to prove the existence of blackholes ? are there any scientific breakthroughs that made it possible or it's more a technological achievement ?
To be clear, they detected the black hole because it <i>looked like</i> the way we expect a supermassive black hole to be? Or were there other hints that led to it being discovered where it was?
The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.
There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...
It's really amazing that human mind can predict and tell the things without even seeing it.<p>How come we even know and predicted the radius and things far away in galaxy without even seeing it. It's just amazing. Wow it just amazes you that scientist even have predicted the radius of thing and how it work etc.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo</a>
Here's today's xkcd comparing it to the size of our solar system: <a href="https://xkcd.com/2135/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2135/</a>
Live Stream: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE</a>
Why does the ESA always couch their discoveries in these stupid press conference panels? Every time I try to watch something of theirs it's a bunch of old people blabbing. Show the pictures and stop talking!
A small thing. It could have been nice if the scientists didn't have commercial bottled water on stage. As an example to the world. Reusable personal containers would have been nice.
MASSSIVELY UNDERWHELMING<p>As a person who has no interest in these intergalactic shenanigans, it looks just like another ball on fire. I wanted to be excited, I really was, but this is just another picture.<p>A giant leap for mankind, and i fully recognize that, but the awe... nada. It's just another picture really. There is nothing fascinating about it.<p>Hats off to the people who brought this to us though. I know gravity of the matter and how daunting a task it was. Keep on!