[Bryan See]

Can this black hole really the window to some alternate universe?

[The E]

No.

[DefCynodont119]

Once all 1,000 pounds of hard drives were filled with these 5 petabytes of raw data, they were loaded onto airplanes and flown to two centralized “correlators,” located in Massachusetts and Germany.

“The fastest way to do that is not over the internet, it’s actually to put them on planes,” said Marrone. “There’s no internet that can compete with 5 petabytes of data on a plane.”

Adding to this challenge, the scientists had to wait until summer to send the hard drives from the South Pole Telescope, as the images were captured during Antarctica’s winter.

The correlators then began the job of syncing up all the data from the telescopes with each other. This means that supercomputers took all the raw observational data collected by the telescopes and used the atomic clock information to line them all up with one another, creating a seamless record of the wavefront of light from the black hole as it reached Earth.

Full article: https://www.inverse.com/article/54833-m87-black-hole-photo-data-storage-feat


This is just bad*ss cool stuff right here.

[Bryan See]

"Imagine a mod with the size of 5 petabytes of assets, textures and models. I doubt FSO, Knossos and HLP will handle it."

So how did these 5 petabytes of data can't be handled on the Internet? I wonder these limitations of over the Internet and cloud computing in general.

[The E]

So how did these 5 petabytes of data can't be handled on the Internet? I wonder these limitations of over the Internet and cloud computing in general.

If you had read the articles about this project, you'd have seen that the data for this project wasn't handled over the internet. They just transported the storage media from the observatories to the University.

[Colonol Dekker]

And there is no connection to mortal engines either.   Any mention of it will result in threadsplit and lock.

[Nightmare]

On a more general note, it's amazing how fast telescope technology is advancing these days; something like this was considered impossible just 10 years ago IIRC.

[DefCynodont119]

On a more general note, it's amazing how fast telescope technology is advancing these days; something like this was considered impossible just 10 years ago IIRC.

One of the reasons I can't wait for James-Webb to be launched!

Seriously, the delays are driving me nuts. . . .

[TheBigCore]

There is widespread attention about the first-ever direct image of a black hole and its shadow, taken by the ground-based Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Now the real question becomes: What is inside the black hole?

[General Battuta]

Now the real question becomes: What is inside the black hole?

Quality username/post combo

[Luis Dias]

Five petabytes of data isn't enough for Luis.  Too many holes to fill in.  (You know, besides the one being observed.)

[insert obvious obviousness about quality not being about quantity]

I mean, it's not as if the end result isn't a bitmap with less than 100kb of data, upsized on photoshopped with nearest neighbor filter or smth.

But my point was different, I won't repeat myself. Those who are bent to misunderstand me won't profit from such effort.

It's not as if we hadn't had conclusive evidence of black holes before,

We, uh, hadn't. Look it up. Previous observational evidence proved, I believe, the existence of various ultra-compact objects bounded by a sphere less than about 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius, but this is the first time observations have been able to directly probe the event horizon.

Don't mind Luis, I can't recall the last time I've seen him be positive about anything.

He's on my ignore list, so if you hadn't quoted him it wouldn't even have crossed my mind in the first place . His point is just pedantic to the extreme, all predictions about the nature of BHs had been confirmed multiple times from multiple angles, astrophysicists have been studying supermassive black holes for a lot of decades now, no one has seriously doubted their existence for eons now.

[Phantom Hoover]

He's on my ignore list, so if you hadn't quoted him it wouldn't even have crossed my mind in the first place .

he was telling me to ignore you, idiot

[Colonol Dekker]

Everyone be nice.

[Phantom Hoover]

but luis has me ignored so if i call him a badger-molesting cuckold guilty of a litany of financial crimes what's the actual harm...?

[Colonol Dekker]

Good point well presented.

[General Battuta]

We were doing black hole math yesterday to figure something out for a story, and discovered that very small black holes (on the order of millions or billions of tons, nothing you'd ever see up there in the sky) are actually insanely luminous, not from accretion disc or polar jet behavior but just from Hawking radiation (!). A hole in the <1 billion ton range will radiate more than one gigawatt! You'd be vaporized by its light before you could get close enough to get sucked in!

[General Battuta]

Interestingly this also means that if you put in the energy to crush a given mass down to a black hole, then collect the hole's radiant energy for the rest of its lifetime, you'll actually come out ahead! Pure matter to energy conversion! It just takes ****ing forever.

[Nightmare]

Is it actually only a GW? It is not that much on a cosmic scale.

[Colonol Dekker]

.28 shy of time travel though

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Well, I've always said black holes were cool, but now I think I need to switch to saying black holes are shiny.

Incidentally, I've also been doing black hole math lately (using a million ton (tonne?) black hole), and now I wonder how many other around the world have been doing that following the release of Messier 87's picture. Black hole math is fun ! You can actually see spaghettification just from calculating things like the gravitational force and watch thing get wacky as you get within 5 meters of the point mass, or figure out how many centimeters away you'll need a rocket engine to pull away.