
Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video] - doktorn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE
======
JumpCrisscross
Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the
way it does [1].

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.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

~~~
mrandish
Wow, the video you posted is even more informative and clear than the actual
press conference, and it was created by someone who hadn't even seen the image
yet based purely on the mathematical predictions of what we would see.

Kind of sad that after all the amazing effort and resources that have gone
into the creating the image that the international team couldn't have featured
an explanation as clear as this in their actual press conference.

~~~
arriu
The video by Veritasium is by a guy who literally got a PHD on the subject of
making physics more approachable through videos. He is exactly the person I
would expect to provide a more clear and understandable explanation.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be&t=280)

~~~
rexpop
Why doesn't he work with the actual astronomers, then?

~~~
code_duck
Because he’s busy making physics more approachable through videos.

~~~
rexpop
Perhaps I should have phrased it as "why don't astronomers work with _him_?"

------
piker
Higher resolution official release seems to be:
[https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg)

~~~
hrdwdmrbl
Does that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?

~~~
pcmaffey
Yes, reminds me of the Eye of Sauron.

~~~
manaskarekar
Funnily, it reminds me of Soundgarden's album, Superunknown, which had the
famous song 'Black Hole Sun.'

[https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown-
Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8...](https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown-
Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8U)

------
turshija
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

~~~
ragebol
Note that the prediction of the light being brighter on one side did come out.

~~~
jessriedel
What are you basing that on? (Edit:) From one of the papers released today:

> The ring is brighter in the south than the north. This can be explained by a
> combination of motion in the source and Doppler beaming. As a simple example
> we consider a luminous, optically thin ring... Then the approaching side of
> the ring is Doppler boosted, and the receding side is Doppler dimmed...This
> sense of rotation is consistent with the sense of rotation in ionized gas at
> arcsecond scales ..Notice that the asymmetry of the ring is consistent with
> the asymmetry inferred from 43 GHz observations of the brightness ratio
> between the north and south sides of the jet and counter-jet

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0f43](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0f43)

(Edit 2:) Ahh, I see your comment now says "did come out". I initially read it
as "did not come out", which was either a misreading on my part (likely) or an
earlier edit by you.

~~~
pcmaffey
Are north and south in astronomy defined relative to Earth’s poles? What about
“lateral” directions, since east and west are relative (no poles, ie. no east
of earth)?

~~~
jessriedel
I don't know for sure how that's defined (I ctrl-f'd and it's not explained in
the paper), but this says the "North" is to the right of the image, and from
context it sounds like it's the north pole of the accretion disk, i.e., the
direction of the rotation axis with the right-hand rule.

> The approaching side of the large-scale jet in M87 is oriented
> west–northwest (position angle $\mathrm{PA}\approx 288^\circ ;$ in Paper VI
> this is called ${\mathrm{PA}}_{\mathrm{FJ}}$), or to the right and slightly
> up in the image.

~~~
thro_away_n
In paper I, Figure 3, it says North is to the top of the image and East is to
the left.

~~~
jessriedel
Whoop. You're right. I misread again.

------
a_d
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 —>
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808](https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808)

Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of
interstellar.

Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating:
[https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M](https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M) — first time I
learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

~~~
pavanred
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode
featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about
Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very
informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.

[0]
[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

[1]
[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip-
thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/)

~~~
a_d
Agree with the recommendation.

Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on
LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it
amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the
prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a
large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.

I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped
space time :)

There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the
process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations
to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip
has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his
entire life studying it.

------
yaseer
International collaboration on scientific projects (International space
station, CERN) always fills me with hope and optimism for humanity.

It's a nice contrast to opening the papers and reading the regular news,
dominated by politics, with all the pessimism that creates.

Hooray for science.

~~~
hinkley
If I understand it, this class of “telescope” is made up of arrays of
telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get
data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It
literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.

As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope
bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on those too but if that
involves a lot of satellites in a heliocentric orbit that may limit
contributions considerably.

~~~
aurailious
Constructing a telescope on Mars would be a valuable investment when a
permanent presence is based there.

~~~
bashinator
Mars is smaller than Earth, so planet-wide radio interferometry would be a
smaller "aperture" than possible on Earth. If you're talking about extending
the telescope to include both Earth and Mars, I imagine that doing the
interferometry over changing speeds and distances would be challenging to say
the least.

~~~
aurailious
The speeds and distances of the planets are well known at this point and
easily predicted. By the time of establishing a permanent presence on Mars the
requirements of communications would already put in place the information
needed if the DSN isn't already capable of it now. The compute needed would be
greater, but so would the availability of it in the future too.

------
okket
The papers with the scientific details are here (open access):

[https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E...](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT)

Article in physics world with comparisons to simulations:

[https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-
unve...](https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unveiled-by-
astronomers-in-landmark-discovery/)

"AskScience" AMA on Reddit about the breakthrough:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscien...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_here_to/)

~~~
nonbel
From reddit:

>"Hi, regarding the image itself: What I don't understand is why does it look
like a donut and not a bright sphere? Assuming the black hole is actually
spherical and not disc shaped, I would expect the Halo to be spherical and
surrounding the black hole? so all we would see would be the ball of bright
gas, even though there is a black hole in the middle?"

This is also what I would have expected.

~~~
db48x
Material can come in towards the black hole from any angle. However, because
matter can't just pass through other matter, matter travelling in the wrong
directions will collide more frequently than matter travelling in the right
direction. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the "right"
direction will depend on the average angular momentum of everything in the
cloud that is collapsing into the disk.

You might be interested to know that this is the same reason all the planets
in our solar system orbit in the same disk: all the matter that is now in our
solar system was originally a very thin cloud of gas with a small amount of
overall angular momentum. As gravity drew it together it flattended out into a
disk and eventually the clumps became planets (and the sun in the middle.)

------
jjeaff
I am not trying to throw cold water on this, but I have some questions.

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.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU)

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.

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.

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?

~~~
neals
Was just wondering this myself. How opinionated is this photo?

~~~
ImaniBlack
Probably very opinionated. I can't help but take this with a grain of salt.
relevant example .How long did it take for people to evolve our view of
dinosaurs as information was reevaluated.

------
itake
This 9 min video [0] does an excellent job explaining what we are looking at.

[0] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be)

------
kristofferR
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk)

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.

~~~
drilldrive
Yeah, no kidding. The presentation in the American conference is much more
insightful and gives a stronger perspective. And the EU conference didn't even
show the image until 8 minutes in.

------
AnimalMuppet
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.

Even today, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
disks...

------
r721
"This is more realistic of the uncertainties involved in this high-end image
reconstruction. Still amazing though! Fig. 4 in
[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85)
"

[https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/111598136971105894...](https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/1115981369711058944)

~~~
SiempreViernes
Yeah, apparently radio interferometry is still very manual and so involves
many relatively subjective decisions to produce an image.

That's probably why they had several analysers that they then combined into
progressively larger teams until they could produce this Consensus-A picture.

~~~
petschge
There is non-manual ways to do it (called self-calibrating), but those need
many more antennas. (What you really need is good coverage of the (u,v) plane
AND many more different baselines between pairs of telescopes than the number
of individual antennas.) If you do not have that self-calibration fails and
leads to horrible image artifact or does not converge at all. They limited the
influence of the manual calibration by observing a Quasar which is basically a
point source between subsequent observations of M87* to get an independent
amplitude calibration.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Some quasar other than M87 I suppose :P

(It is a quasar, simbad says so and that's good enough for this setting!)

~~~
petschge
Yes. They used 3C 279 which is more than 100 times further away than M87.

------
symlock
For those wondering how the image was constructed:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE)

Basically, the image has been constructed by calculations on massive
measurement data-sets from multiple synchronized telescopes around the world.

So this isn't a "photo" in the normal sense. It's a reconstruction of many,
many radio waves.

------
nonbel
It doesn't sound like they just snapped a picture. The one guy says they used
"supercomputers" for 6 months to get the image.

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?

EDIT:

Found the paper describing the data processing:
[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57)

~~~
LolWolf
As far as I know K. Bouman [0] was the scientist leading the charge on the
image processing/reconstruction. A few of her later papers probably have hints
[1, 2] about how this is done, but I haven't seen the official release.

[0]
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/)

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08832.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08832.pdf)

[2]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07361.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07361.pdf)

~~~
nonbel
Thanks, I think I added the link to the paper while you were writing this.
From skimming it I can't tell the answer to my question though.

How do they know what appears "black" in the image is really black vs.
relatively black?

~~~
LolWolf
If you observe a very wide band of light (e.g., EM radiation) and there is
nothing received from those spots, then, for all intents and purposes, the
region of that image is black.

Now, if you're asking if, perhaps, the region isn't really black, but rather
it's emitting some sort of small radiation relative to the bright region, it
would be essentially impossible to know without much higher resolving powers
(since it might even be indistinguishable from the background noise generated
by the surrounding region). There is no way to really know if it's "perfectly
black" vs. "orders of magnitude darker than the surrounding regions."

~~~
nonbel
Makes sense. So I guess they could probably tell us an upper bound on how
bright it is.

~~~
LolWolf
Indeed! That’s for sure: it’s probably not hard to extract a bound on the
magnitude of a part of the spectrum from this analysis.

~~~
nonbel
Any idea how bright it might be? Eg, could it be as bright as the sun? The
moon?

------
_void
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?

~~~
crimsonalucard
It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic
doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail
will blow me away.

~~~
lanewinfield
Consider yourself lucky that a black hole isn't Jupiter level distance from
us.

~~~
crimsonalucard
At a jupiter level distance we'd be well within the event horizon. At that
distance I expect to see four dimensional book cases and my daughter.

------
montenegrohugo
It's just a stupid collection of small pixels but somehow it feels very
overwhelming looking at it for the first time.

What a time to be alive

~~~
bytematic
Because that collection of pixels is really out there

------
novaRom
Excellent example of successful international collaboration, with distributed
team. Great results and promising future work: they say Sagitarius-A* is their
next target!

------
niklasrde
The telescope's announcement is up, too:
[https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/)

------
ckugblenu
The EU is finally learning from the US when it comes making a lot of fanfare
for discoveries and other inventions.

~~~
Gravityloss
Too bad they don't present it well. I just see self congratulating politicians
and officials on some youtube stream.

Telling that it's a US organization that hosts the actual picture.

esa.int and eso.org seem to be down actually.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Both ESO and the NFS hosts the images, don't know what gave you any other
impression.

And while the EC stream was pretty bad, at least they let you skip back in the
stream and left it up after the presentation ended. The NFS stream wouldn't
allow you to go back (useful if you joined late) while it was up.

Personally I liked the ALMA stream best, but it's down now :(

~~~
mlindner
[https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/) is
hosted in the US and the linked image links to a Harvard.edu web server.

------
huffmsa
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?

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"

~~~
PeanutNore
A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single
infinitesimal point. The event horizon around it is roughly a sphere. The
diagrams that you are talking about are a visual metaphor that represent 3D
space as a 2D plane and the 3rd dimension standing in for the influence of
gravity. IRL, spacetime has 3 spatial dimensions, not 2, and gravity is not a
dimension but a force. It's hard to visually represent gravitational
distortion of 3 dimensional space without a 4th spatial dimension to do it
with, so textbook diagrams use a 2D plane.

~~~
pflats
I think you've got a typo here: points should be 0-dimensional.

~~~
curlypaul924
Are you sure it's a typo?

[https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/194947](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/194947)

(I'm not a physicist.)

~~~
checkyoursudo
I believe the previous poster is referring to a typo following from this:

>A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single
infinitesimal point.

In Euclidean geometry,

A cube is 3 dimensions.

A plane is 2 dimensions.

A line is 1 dimension.

A point is ...

------
alkonaut
So much higher res than I thought (I was expecting a 3x3px black and white).

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?

~~~
petschge
The limit in some sense is the size of the Earth. This picture is from an
interferometer observing at very high radio frequencies (wavelength of 1.3 mm)
using telescope around the Earth. To improve resolution you would either have
to go to even higher frequencies (we have a very hard time doing
interferometry there) or find baselines larger than what fits on Earth. And
you don't just need a long baseline, but need to keep the baseline constant to
within a fraction of the wavelength. So if you want to use satellites to get
longer baselines you would have to know their orbit to within a tenth of a
millimeter.

As an aside: that image is basically black and white. The intensity is just
mapped to black -> orange -> white instead of black -> gray -> white.

~~~
peatmoss
I wonder how important time is in collecting these data? Because if 6 months
isn’t an issue, then the array size could be expanded in one axis to the
diameter of Earth’s orbit around the sun, no?

~~~
stargazer-3
The collecting time is important, but mainly to 1) sample the rotation of the
Earth in the Fourier space for better angular resolution and 2) for raising
your overall signal-to-noise ratio is the image (but the one released is
already pretty good, so not much improvement can be done there unless you're
trying to go for the faint features in the image).

Unfortunately, you can only do interferometry with simultaneous measurements
(we need information about the difference in the phase of light hitting the
receiving antennas), so the motion of Earth around the Sun is largely
irrelevant, unless you can park another antenna at a trailing orbit (see space
VLBI for that).

What you're thinking of is probably parallax measurements of distance - that's
how missions like Gaia can pinpoint distances to stars in Milky Way (and some
in its satellites as well).

~~~
alkonaut
Thanks.

We seem to need a big radiotelescope on the moon then? That should give
simultaneous measurement on a much larger baseline?

~~~
petschge
I doesn't even need to be that big. A 60 meter dish would do nicely.

Problem is, you would want to have several Gigahertz of (radio) bandwidth. You
are not going to down link that raw, but rather as a number of channels,
integrated over a number of microseconds and digitized at something between 4
and 64 samples per bit, but we are still talking a down link data rate of
gigabits per second.

------
veryworried
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)?

~~~
andygates
These obs are in radio. We could replace your eyes with radio eyes... ..but
it's friction heating so it ought to be broadly blackbody, so I would say yes.

------
e0m
"This is like viewing a mustard seed in Washington DC from Brussels"

~~~
HenryBemis
Pedantic/fun comment: I will assume that one of the presenters said that (I
will watch the full video later tonight). One would imagine that that person
knows that you cannot see a mustard seed from Brussels because the planet's
crust is blocking your line of sight ;) unless the scientist who said that is
a flat-earth-believer!

A statement like "it is like viewing a mustard seed X kilometres/miles away
would be more appropriate.

And in all seriousness, I have started watching again everything-Star-Trek
again (for the 5th time in my life), and news like that make me look up to the
sky and think that as a species we do have a chance to move out of here and to
a better future.

~~~
the8472
Such a photon-centric perspective. Why don't you use your neutrino perceptors
to look at the seed?

------
dugluak
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?

~~~
t3hz0r
As I understand it, by being more massive this black hole has roughly the same
angular size in the sky as Sag A* at the center of our galaxy, but none of the
dusty foreground in the way so we get a clearer vantage point.

------
negamax
Does anyone remember Interstellar. Their black hole simulation was based on
hard science. Looks fairly similar

~~~
vxNsr
just had my wife watch it and yea, that was the first thing I noticed, they
really did a good job on the science of interstellar.

When interstellar came out wired did a full magazine spread on the movie,
covering its science, how they came up with the story and what the director
did to make sure it was believable. idk what it looks like online but I've
kept the magazine.

~~~
etatoby
The visualization I liked the best in Interstellar was that of the wormhole,
seen from the outside. (The "travel" through it was rubbish.)

The thing would look like a mirror sphere, floating in the middle of space,
reflecting the space around you. Except it would be the space on the other
side of the wormhole, not that behind you, and the motion of the "mirrored"
image would be opposite of that on a real mirror. (The apparent image on the
wormhole's spherical surface would appear to move in your same direction, as
you're moving around it, not in the opposite direction as it does on a
spherical mirror.)

It took me a while to reason about it and figure out that it was indeed what a
wormhole would look like, if we could find or create one.

[https://youtu.be/f3ptQ0CPMmU](https://youtu.be/f3ptQ0CPMmU)

~~~
codethief
Relevant paper:
[https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.4916949?class=p...](https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.4916949?class=pdf)

------
zakki
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?

~~~
tempestn
The black hole itself is spherical, but the light we're seeing around it isn't
projected by the event horizon; rather, it's light from behind/around the
black hole that isn't blocked. This video explains in much more detail:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

~~~
usaphp
But if it's spherical, should not the light be all around it?

~~~
tempestn
If it were emitting the light, yes, but it's not. It's more complicated than
this, but imagine holding a black sphere in front of a light bulb. You'll see
a ring of light around the sphere.

Somewhat separately, there's the accretion disk, which again is a disk not a
sphere, much like other orbiting systems like solar systems or galaxies−the
gravity between bodies orbiting the same central gravity source causes them to
arrange roughly into a plane, rather than all having their own unrelated
orbits. We're not seeing the accretion disk directly though, but rather the
light from it, and from other sources, that is able to pass around the black
hole. (ie the black sphere in front of the light bulb.)

Watch that video; it explains it in a very approachable way.

------
zeristor
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.

Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the
Interstellar Medium.

~~~
thatcherc
Space VLBI is a thing already! Seems to have been around for a while [0][1]. I
imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink
bandwidth... there's just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about
down from a satellite. It's already so much data that it's easier to fly hard
drives around the world than to send it over the internet, so the transfer
would probably take ages over a microwave link. Maybe with laser communication
in the near future but even then... it's a lot of data.

Resolution-wise, the angular resolution is inversely proportional to the
farthest baseline, as given by the Rayleigh criterion. [2] To get twice the
resolution, you "just" need to double the size of your baseline (and do that
in both dimensions, otherwise the angular resolution will be different in x &
y). We've maxed out the Earth's baseline, so it seems like orbital radio
telescopes are the only way to better resolution. Pretty exciting!

[0] - [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/space-very-long-
baseline-i...](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/space-very-long-baseline-
interferometry-space-vlbi/)

[1] -
[https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/07/25/thi...](https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/07/25/thirty-
years-of-space-vlbi/)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution)

~~~
privong
> We've maxed out the Earth's baseline, so it seems like orbital radio
> telescopes are the only way to better resolution.

Going to higher frequency gives you higher resolution for a given physical
baseline length.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
For some observations, they've used the earth's moving position in space to
create a synthetic-radar style image. That gives an 'aperture' of 180M miles.

~~~
privong
> For some observations, they've used the earth's moving position in space to
> create a synthetic-radar style image. That gives an 'aperture' of 180M
> miles.

That may not work for imaging the immediate surroundings of black holes – one
can only combine the data for that SAR-style imaging if the source you're
observing doesn't vary significantly (e.g., in brightness or flux
distribution) between observations.

------
mythz
Katie Bouman herself did a fascinating Ted Talk behind the effort involved for
creating the first image of a black hole:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hol...](https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like)

------
Aardwolf
So we got an image of one in a far away galaxy before the one in the center of
our own galaxy!

~~~
freejak
Is this due to occlusion?

~~~
petschge
A lot of the problems with imaging the black hole at the center of the milkway
is that we would have to look along the midplane of the galaxy towards the
center. That is where a lot of gas and dust is to be found and the radio waves
interact with that stuff. They did take data and are working on it, but the
image of M87* was easier to reconstruct and went out first.

------
ArtWomb
Breakthrough discovery in astronomy: press conference

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

~~~
ArtWomb
And the image itself:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg)

~~~
piker
Is this image lossy compressed by Twitter? Is there an official release?

~~~
nathanm412
[https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/formedia...](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/formedia.jsp)

------
fsakura
I always thought we have photographed black holes. Any idea/link to article
where it explains why this took so long and why it was difficult?

~~~
lovehashbrowns
Their website talks about some of the challenges of getting a picture of a
black hole:
[https://eventhorizontelescope.org/home](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/home)

All of the data used to generate the image was gathered by around a dozen
different telescopes around the world. The black hole itself also needs to be
in a specific configuration in order for us to be able to see it. It needs to
have an accretion disk that's generating light. It needs to be sufficiently
large or close. And it can't be obfuscated by other astronomical objects like
stars or nebulae. This black hole itself is hugeeeeee and far. It's about the
size of our solar system, but it's ~52 million light years away.

------
harshvladha
Does anybody noticed that there are two brighter areas (not just one) in
bottom part of the image.

One at approx 8PM and one at approx 5-6PM (if seen as clock)

------
pulse7
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?

------
pontifier
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.

Burried in that 5 petabytes of data is likely a scan of a much larger field of
view at a similar resolution.

~~~
petschge
Yes. But since you have a bright spot in the center of the larger image and
you only have a limited number of baseline between pairs of telescopes there
will be all kinds of artefacts in the outer portion of that large image. So it
get's cropped away. (Most of it is actually never even computed).

~~~
pontifier
I still think it would be worth pursuing. I hope the raw data will be made
available at some point... Not that I have 5 petabytes free space available
right now...

------
mkurz
Here it is: [https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild-
ist...](https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild-ist-da.jpg)

------
angrygoat
Here's the image via twitter:
[https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328](https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328)

~~~
fabricexpert
Here's the image via a URL:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png)

> Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event
> Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image
> shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a
> black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

------
vertline3
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?

~~~
petschge
Saturns ring, the flattening of the accretion disk, the fact that planet
systems will have most planets more or less in one plane and that spiral
galaxies are flat (much thinner than they are wide at least) all have the same
reason, yes. Basically most orbits align due to initial orbital momentum and
the stuff that orbits in other directions sooner or later experiences enough
friction to be forced into the common orbital plane.

------
sus_007
Here's an animated explanation of the process by the Event Horizon Telescope.
[https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE](https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE)

~~~
ken
Misspeak? This video says it's 4 million times as massive as the sun, but
today's press release and Wikipedia article about it both say it's 6.5
_billion_ times as massive.

~~~
ProAm
The black hole at the center of the milky way is 4 million times the mass of
our sun, the one in the photograph is much more massive. Im guessing that is
what they were referring to.

------
jschrf
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?

~~~
doctorstupid
Don't it's no fun you'll get space sickness trust me.

------
shireboy
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.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's been done since the 1970s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer)

There are some proposals to do it in space.

[https://www.universetoday.com/139566/instead-of-building-
sin...](https://www.universetoday.com/139566/instead-of-building-single-
monster-scopes-like-james-webb-what-about-swarms-of-space-telescopes-working-
together/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna)

------
jhallenworld
So how can we make a planet sized synthetic aperture optical telescope?

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:

[https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document](https://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document)

(spy satellites probably already do it...)

------
novaRom
Can we see nearest stars and planets using this method? Or is it only for
radio sources?

One day we may even connect millions of smartphones to observe various
interesting space phenomena.

------
myth_buster
On a tangent, interesting closing remarks from the commissioner on the
importance of courage, dreams and science. Targeted towards the present anti-
science climate.

------
gigatexal
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.

~~~
hacker_9
General relativity predicted the event horizon, but it breaks down when trying
to predict what is going on in the center, as all equations go to infinity,
which is likely to be more a problem with our current understanding than what
is actually happening.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I wonder if this is a call for another level of math. Are we just not able to
take the derivative of something in respect to space time rather than just
time?

------
zaph0d_
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.

~~~
petschge
Have a look at the papers listed at the bottom of
[https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E...](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT)
.

Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they
have used CASA and AIPS, two standard software tools that have been developed
over more than a decade. Details are consequently scattered over many papers.
Radio interferometry is not new and there is entire textbooks on the subject.
The exiting bit here is not that we go a first image from interferometry but
that we have a first image of the region just around a black hole.

------
brink
Here's an article (and image) from the guardian:
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-
hole-p...](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)

------
novaRom
Why there are two live events right now? One is from Europe, another from US:

EU:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

US:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M)

~~~
bionsystem
There are 6. It's an international accomplishment.

------
docker_up
If there's a God, He must be so incredibly proud of us. What we have
accomplished as a species is just mind-blowing.

------
zeristor
I wonder how it compares to the one from Interstellar?

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-t...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-
true-black-hole-too-confusing/)

~~~
jessriedel
This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big
thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion
disk).

[http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imagin...](http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imaging-
black-holes/)

~~~
TheHypnotist
Since we're on it, there's actually a book about the science of interstellar.

[https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-
Thorne/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-
Thorne/dp/0393351378)

~~~
Insanity
The author (Thorne) was actually a producer for the movie, as well as a being
a physics professor.

------
turshija
Google Cache because site got stomped with traffic

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.eso.org/public/)

~~~
novaRom
Even that page is not opening for me ...

------
basicplus2
I have a real problem with this..

they have not taken a picture of a black hole because that is not possible..

they have at best constructed an image of some effects of a black hole.

This is where top scientists do damage to science for ordinary people when
they make fundamental errors in public statements.

------
sigmaprimus
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.

~~~
qlk1123
You are wrong, this is definitely a photo, shot by multiple telescopes global-
wise.

~~~
sigmaprimus
Multiple radio telescopes right? Then the data was compiled and rendered into
an image, you really think it's that bright? How about orange? I wonder why
it's not symmetrical? I suppose you can take multiple images combine them into
one, run it through a bunch of filters and call it a photo but I still think
it's more of a rendering than a photo.

~~~
brandonjm
> Then the data was compiled and rendered into an image

A digital camera is just an array of tiny sensors that detect how much light
hit them and a computer takes those values and renders an image from them.

> you really think it's that bright?

If you take a photo in a dark room with increased exposure then the resulting
image is brighter than what you see with your own eyes. This was taken over a
long period of time, effectively a long exposure. If you were close enough to
see it at the scale you are seeing it on your computer screen it would
probably be far brighter.

> How about orange?

As mentioned in another comment on this thread, it's just the colour scheme
used in the output to show the brightness differences. The accretion disk is
not necessarily orange, this photo is essentially greyscale mapped to a black
-> orange -> white scale.

This is just an array of relatively large sensors with very high exposure
gathering information from something very far away and combining that data in
greyscale.

> I wonder why it's not symmetrical?

See Veritasium's video [1] on why it looks like it does, in short, the effects
of the black hole and our angle to the accretion disk.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

------
it
If you want to jump directly to the image, here it is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s)

------
dugluak
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.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Yeah. There were a few NASA projects attempting to do this that got cancelled
circa 2010 (programs called TPF-I and SIM).

Something that has been done for a while is using a single telescope in space
in conjunction with some on Earth. Russia has a radio telescope in orbit
called Spektr-R. I think it died recently, but Spektr-R did interferometry
with other telescopes on Earth. When it was operational, I believe it was the
widest VLBI array— its orbit was higher than GEO (and even intersected the
moon's!), so it got pretty good distance from the ground.

------
amy12xx
Katie Bouman's 2017 TED video explaining how the image was taken
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs)

------
skanderbm
Reminds me of this project (building a realistic blackhole raytracer)
[http://rantonels.github.io/starless](http://rantonels.github.io/starless)

------
zyngaro
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 ?

------
return0
To be clear, they detected the black hole because it _looked like_ the way we
expect a supermassive black hole to be? Or were there other hints that led to
it being discovered where it was?

------
omarchowdhury
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.

------
acl777
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...

~~~
nukeop
There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole
with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion
disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general
relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal
healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive
objects at certain points.

~~~
beat
Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if
you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect
evidence.

And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our
senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes' argument that
there is no real evidence of _anything_ except our own existence.

btw, I'm just some hacker's AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.

~~~
sam0x17
FML I just took this literally and was breaking down the post to see how this
could have been an ML-based response from a bot. Then I looked at the poster's
other comments and realized I'm an idiot. :(

~~~
beat
We're all idiots, my friend. Remembering that is the hardest and most
important work we can do.

------
hashfunktion
Pardon my naïveté, I never took advance physics, but if light can't escape
from a blackhole, then how can we "take a picture" of one?

~~~
ValleyOfTheMtns
It's a photo of the absence of light (in the middle) and light/particles
swirling around the black hole that haven't passed the event horizon (yet).

------
m3kw9
How come it so happens we are looking at the black part while the sides are
bright? Does it look like a O from any angle of the sphere?

------
hinkley
How jaded have I become that when I see four old men and one young person I
automatically assume the younger one did all the work?

------
cronix
Now I'm really curious if Quantum Entanglement will work if you send one of
the entangled particles into a black hole.

------
dangban
Is this a 2D slice of the actual spherical black hole?

Because if a black hole is a sphere, then shouldn't the whole thing be golden?

~~~
scottie_m
The black hole is warping spacetime around it in a severe fashion. The
innermost (unstable) orbit is called the photon sphere, and light can make
several orbits around the hole before either falling in, or going off to
infinity. The result is that (depending on the hole’s rotation relative to
your point of view) you’re going to see roughly the same image we have today.
You’re actually going to see multiple images of the entire hole, stretched
around the outer edge, and those images multiplied and distorted again. If you
could somehow “stand” by the photon spehere you’d see the back of your own
head many many times.

The other factor is that while the event horizon itself is a spheroid, the
accretion disk of bright infalling material is not. The horizon is totally
black, so it will always look roughly like seeing a disk face-on no matter
where you look at it. The accretion disk is a “hoop” that’s stretched and the
image is multiplied and distorted by the strong warping of spacetime in the
region. As a result you get smeared and repeated views of the _entire_ disk
including portion behind the hole in a kind of bent band. Plus the whole thing
is subject to strong Doppler beaming hence the bright and dark regions.

------
codesternews
It's really amazing that human mind can predict and tell the things without
even seeing it.

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]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

------
stunt
Numbers about measures and dimensions are mind blowing. You can find articles
with more details.

------
zframroze
This is so phenomenal. What an amazing and tremendous effort from that team!

------
malikNF
The reveal happens at -27:06

------
ezekg
This is one of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen. Fascinating.

------
csomar
Does this confirm or disapprove Steven Hawking Black-hole radiation?

~~~
symmetricsaurus
The Hawking radiation for a black hole with this mass would be really small.
It actually decreases with added mass. So, this observation does not say
anything about Hawking radiation.

~~~
ajuc
Shouldn't it increase, just with square of the radius, so it's dwarfed by all
the effects that scale with cube of the radius?

~~~
petschge
The temperature is actually inversely proportional to black hole mass and the
power that is radiated away even falls like the square of the mass. (A rough
but illustrative derivation can be found in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#A_crude_anal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#A_crude_analytic_estimate)
)

------
quadcore
100 billion kilometres wide, is that correct?

------
wallace_f
Can someone explain in layman terms: If graviton particles or gravity waves
travel at light speed, how does this information escape the event horizon?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It doesn't. It escapes from _outside_ the event horizon. The event horizon is
the dark area in the middle.

~~~
wallace_f
A rephrasing: How does the gravity-information about what's inside the event
horizon get out?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's a _really_ interesting question. (And you did say "graviton particles
or gravity waves" in your first post, and I missed that.)

At first glance, I _think_ that the gravity information can't escape from
inside the event horizon, just like light can't. That means that the event
horizon describes a frozen version of the mass inside it, not a current "live"
version.

And that seems to work, if you think about gravity waves. There aren't any
changes to the gravitational field coming out from inside the event horizon.
But it doesn't work so well if you think about gravitons. "There aren't any
gravitons coming out" should be equivalent to "flat worldlines", which is very
much not true just outside the event horizon.

It also doesn't seem to work for a situation like a black hole merger. The
spacetime outside the event horizon is this frozen snapshot, but it can still
do this spiral around this other black hole? That doesn't seem to make a ton
of sense.

So I'm not sure my answer is very good. But it's a _fascinating_ question. If
anyone has a real answer, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
Pharmakon
It’s not that interesting unfortunately, although I liked your approach. A
graviton would be just another boson like a photon, and like a photon would be
unable to escape. All of the worldlines of a graviton within the event horizon
would lead to a collision with th singularity. It’s just another aspect of “No
Hair” on the hole.

Remember that this applies everything where r≤1. As far as “flat” worldlines I
think you might be thinking of a geodesic approaching r=1 in terms of a null
geodesic, which isn’t necessarily true unless we’re dealing with a photon or
graviton. Regions I,II of the Classic Kruskal-Szekeres extension illustrates
this pretty clearly.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates#/media/File%3AKruskal_diagram_of_Schwarzschild_chart.svg)

The total mass of the black hole (and all other information possible about it)
can be described in terms of the boundary at r=1, so there’s no problem with
mergers or accretion. To answer Wallace’s original question, we see _no_
information escaping the black hole. What we’re seeing is sort of like shining
a light on an absence of information, and observing the shadow cast. That’s
not quite right, but it’s close.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
But there pretty clearly is a gravitational field at r > 1\. If that field is
made up of gravitons, and a graviton can't escape from the mass to outside r =
1, then what is the source of the gravitons that compose the field at r > 1?
If they don't originate at the mass, then... what?

~~~
Pharmakon
The manifold is well-behaved and continuous at r=1, and mass is one of the few
characteristics a black hole has other than spin and charge. Gravitons from
within the event horizon won’t escape, but the event horizon itself can be
thought of as the entire black hole (for everything outside of the black
hole).

This discussion might help where my ability to answer your excellent question
is failing: [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-
gra...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gravity-
escape-a-black-hole)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Thank you for that link - it was very helpful. Summarizing:

The same problem would exist for the electric field from a charged black hole.
However, static fields don't need propagating photons to establish them, so
you don't have to get photons from inside the black hole in order for the
electric field to be established outside.

The same would be true of gravitons. But one respondent indicated that general
relativity can't do a second quantization like electromagnetism, and therefore
gravitons are... suspect? Impossible? Not proven? It wasn't clear to me how
strongly to take that statement.

------
n00bdude
What do you reckon is in the black hole?

------
sbhn
Why are they all wearing suits?

------
laythea
Is this as real as the computer edited NASA images (eg of earth) or is the
_actually_ real?

------
briarpatch
Here's today's xkcd comparing it to the size of our solar system:
[https://xkcd.com/2135/](https://xkcd.com/2135/)

------
dandigangi
What a time to be alive! I wish Hawking got to see it.

~~~
dandigangi
Lol, why would someone downvote this?

------
jahrule
black ties and revelations...

------
modzu
why is it oblong???

~~~
delecti
If you mean the brightness asymmetry, it's because the accretion disc is
spinning. This video predicts pretty well all of the features we expected to
find, and it lines up with the actual image.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

------
mkurz
Live Stream:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

~~~
novaRom
Thanks! Over 150,000 viewers right now.

------
mkurz
502 Bad Gateway

~~~
niklasrde
Screenshot from press conference:
[https://imgur.com/UBsPgzw](https://imgur.com/UBsPgzw)

Edit: Better posted above:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg)

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colinwilyb

      INT. EUROPEAN COMMISSION – PHONE RINGS
      
      SAMARA
      Seven days...

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tomc1985
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!

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azernik
This isn't ESA, it's unrelated EU-funded research.

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crocal
My God, it's full of stars!

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ape4
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.

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petschge
Most scientist I know have a reusable water bottle on their desk. And a coffee
cup. But it will likely have a cat or a joke of the "astronomers do it in the
dark" flavour on it. Not something you typically want to show on TV. Also they
traveled from their home institutes to the location of the press conference
and got handed that plastic bottle by some well-meaning PR person.

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ape4
For this event they could have purchased multiple use containers for each
person. Wasteful but a better image. So not really their personal containers.

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patagonia
One difference between a Tesla or Apple style event vs a staid, scientific one
such as this. Starting in the evening vs 9am...

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legatus
Isn't that related to the fact that it has been announced across the world at
the same time? In europe it was announced at 3 pm for example. I'm sorry, I
don't understand your point

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patagonia
That showmanship counts. I don’t believe HN would argue with me if I said “a
strong sales group can make or break a company”. Why is it unfashionable to
suggest that, in the marketplace of ideas, with an announcement of this
magnitude, this exciting, this “sexy”, the presentation of the announcement
would benefit from being delivered in a likewise suitable atmosphere. At
night, as an event, in a cool warehouse with cool music. I’m not trying to
take anything away from the inherent excitement and importance of the news.
Just suggesting that the cause could be furthered _even more_ if there was a
little hype, a little showmanship. Rather than a well lit lecture hall
populated by scruffy reporters, early in the morning, morning as defined in
the locale the event is being held.

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beat
Appropriate types and degrees of showmanship/salesmanship depend on the target
customer. And scientists, by and large, don't seem to be concerned with
impressing the general public - or at least, that is far secondary to the
importance of impressing other scientists.

One could argue that making an impression on other scientists is the basis of
the scientific method. And we impress with the quality of our evidence and the
repeatability of our experiments.

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patagonia
> And scientists, by and large, don’t seem to be concerned with impressing the
> public...

Some quotes from European Research Commissioner Moedas, answering the first
question.

“...which is that this is linking between the citizens and science, how
important is that?...”

“Because we want European citizens to feel connected.”

“I’ve never seen this room so full.”

“It’s so refreshing to come here, to see so many people, to see people clap. I
mean it’s very rare in a press room to have people clapping.”

During his introductory comments also, he is clearly excited and wants to
engage people, and not simply through the scientific method. He talks about
watching sci-fi movies as a kid and books on science.

People. It’s ok to throw Science a party.

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chirau
MASSSIVELY UNDERWHELMING

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.

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.

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!

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ttul
Perhaps consider this: "VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution
of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a
sidewalk café in Paris [6]."

What's surprising about this image is how utterly microscopic the thing is
that was observed - from our location. The width of the event horizon is 40
billion kilometers. That's only 267x the diameter of our orbit around the Sun.
But the M87 black hole is 26,000 light years away. 26,000 light years is
2.45979e+17 km, or 639,903,746,098 times farther away than the moon.

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phonypc
53 million light years. 26 thousand would still be in our own galaxy.

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ttul
Quite right. Thank you for the correction.

