I'm slightly skeptical about the end result, there's a lot of algorithmic pressupositions that were used to fill in the gaps of just using around 8 telescopes around the globe.
But the feat is amazing in itself. I can't wait for new radiotelescopes to enter the network, and to see if there are noticeable differences if they use, say, 20 or 30 telescopes instead of the ones they used.
I'm slightly skeptical about the end result, there's a lot of algorithmic pressupositions that were used to fill in the gaps of just using around 8 telescopes around the globe.
But the feat is amazing in itself. I can't wait for new radiotelescopes to enter the network, and to see if there are noticeable differences if they use, say, 20 or 30 telescopes instead of the ones they used.
I don't think more scopes will fundamentally alter the basic facts here; It's not like anything we'd be able to see at higher resolution would invalidate the point that Relativity has been confirmed again.
It's not as if we hadn't had conclusive evidence of black holes before,
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. For me, one reinforces the other. The more I learn, the more I understand, the more amazing the universe becomes!
Don't mind Luis, I can't recall the last time I've seen him be positive about anything. :)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.
How many seconds from release until the first goatse of it? :pWell, goatse died some 15-20 years ago, so that seems unlikely.
All black holes look exactly the same, apart from size. I imagine there's probably some variation in the accretion disc, but probably not massive variation. I doubt there's vast visual difference between black holes.
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.
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.
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.
(https://static.projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xlarge/public/eht/files/20190410-78m-800x466.png)
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?
Five petabytes of data isn't enough for Luis. Too many holes to fill in. (You know, besides the one being observed.)
Don't mind Luis, I can't recall the last time I've seen him be positive about anything. :)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.
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 ;).
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!
Is it actually only a GW? It is not that much on a cosmic scale.
Is it actually only a GW? It is not that much on a cosmic scale.
Is it actually only a GW? It is not that much on a cosmic scale.
From something smaller than a picometer and not tremendously massive? Yes it is.
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
Is it actually only a GW? It is not that much on a cosmic scale.
From something smaller than a picometer and not tremendously massive? Yes it is.
I don't doubt that a GW/<picometer is a lot; just compared to other things cosmic things it doesn't seem that much out of human scale.
1. Conversations aren't about having the biggest numbers, this isn't Stardestroyer.net
Battuta, during your calculations, did you figure out how much time would that mountain-mass black hole would survive before complete evaporation?I mean, since it's direct matter->energy conversion and you know it's radiating at a gigawatt (to start with) you can give a rough estimate of 1 billion tons * c² / 1 GW = approximately... 2.584 * 10^12 years, or approximately 190 times the age of the universe. That's an upper bound, though; the smaller the black hole, the faster it evaporates, meaning that the actual time will be significantly less. Specifically, according to the formula for black hole lifetime I found, it would take... 1.99 * 10^12 years, or approximately 140 times the age of the universe. So, still a fantastically long time.
Battuta, during your calculations, did you figure out how much time would that mountain-mass black hole would survive before complete evaporation?