
The black hole picture is both an astonishing achievement and a deceptive image - swombat
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/the-black-hole-picture-is-an-astonishing-achievement-and-one-of-the-most-deceptive-scientific-images-ever
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jameshart
The use of the word 'deceptive' in this headline is astonishingly
disingenuous. I don't think the article intends to accuse the publishers of
the image of deception, but the headline sure reads that way. The article is
just trying to explain that imaging a black hole is inherently
counterintuitive.

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sk5t
Well, from the other side of the peanut gallery, I think your outrage is
misplaced. "Deception" needn't be malicious, and the title already calls this
out as an "astonishing achievement."

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kurthr
I think you're trying to say that telling white lies is deception, but not
malicious... however, in this case it is not the scientist nor the picture,
but they claim nature that is malicious in showing us what we expect to see
(or what the writers think we expect to see).

"The temptation is to interpret the EHT image as a straightforward telescopic
view of the hot accretion disk, seen from above, with the black hole carving
out a hole in the middle. But it isn’t quite that."

So that's not what I expected to see, nor what I think I saw, but then I'm
probably not part of the typical public. I do realize that it's a radio image
not in the visible spectrum... so maybe that's deceptive too, like thermal
imaging. But it's still click bait.

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gloflo
To save you from the clickbait: 'The simplistic portrait masks a mind-
bendingly complex reality' is the subtitle.

If you plan grace the site with your visit be prepared to be forced to thank
them for telling you about their tracking.

And if you actually plan to read the text be prepared to be forced to thank
them for putting some advertisement in front of it.

I left feeling violated and disgusted.

~~~
snazz
For those of you not using an adblocker for some reason, the Outline link
works fine, as usual: [https://outline.com/DHUuhM](https://outline.com/DHUuhM)

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simias
Given the original title of the submission I was expecting some clickbait
drama but it's actually a pretty inspiring read.

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nvahalik
FTA: "An object in the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way) called Sagittarius
A* is thought to be such a “supermassive” black hole."

If this black hole is 55M LY away and the center of our galaxy should have
one. So, why is it that we can see this one, but not the one at the center of
our galaxy? Is it because there are things in our line of site with it?

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vertline3
I heard it can be hard to see our center black hole because we are on the
Galaxy disk so we have to look through a lot of light pollution and dust
things to see it?

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nvahalik
Yeah, I was researching further and found this[0] SE question. Seems to also
say the same thing that there is a lot of "space dust" between here and there.

[0]: [https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/30339/why-
not-...](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/30339/why-not-take-a-
picture-of-a-closer-black-hole)

~~~
cgriswald
Sure, but at these long wavelengths the dust is effectively transparent.

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ianai
I’m surprised by the amount of criticism and general push back this image has
taken. I don’t remember anything similar from the LIGO nor LHC results.

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tntn
... there's no criticism in this article.

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ianai
I wasn’t talking about just this article. Theres a movement to discredit the
woman behind the algorithm and trump up a male researcher instead. But the
word “deceptive” is in the title of this discussion, as well. I’m sure there
are other examples and I’m not going to go searching.

Further, of course a photo of a black hole is going to take some serious
science and technology. If it were possible to do directly more easily then
this wouldn’t be news.

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huhwatnow
It's not deceptive as much as it is dumbed-down and devalued as a tool for
increasing scientific literacy and curiosity - at the very least the image
should have included a distance and radiation energy scales - preferably
several at different distances from the event horizon to account for GR. As it
was released the xkcd comic of it provides more value than the image itself.

