First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIST

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First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIST

Postby KleinerKiller » Wed Apr 10, 2019 8:53 pm

Scientists have taken the first ever picture of a black hole, thus finally moving black holes from "pretty sure they're there, but it's still all theoretical" to "YOOO WE DOIN IT".

Image

This a big, big deal for astrophysics, and I'm not quite smart enough to properly explain why, but like, BLACK HOLES, MAN. Shit's cool. It's important to recognize immense scientific achievements in the midst of the constant storm of tyranny and madness.

But that thing's going to fucking wink at us and we're all going to die
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Apr 10, 2019 9:27 pm

Looks like a gummy ring.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Absentia » Wed Apr 10, 2019 10:41 pm

KleinerKiller wrote:This a big, big deal for astrophysics, and I'm not quite smart enough to properly explain why


The short answer is that the existence of black holes is predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, which has been the central pillar of astrophysics for the last hundred years.

If it turned out that black holes didn't exist, that would mean Einstein was fundamentally wrong and invalidate basically everything we thought we knew about the large-scale universe.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Apr 10, 2019 11:54 pm

Yup. I can just see it now. Blackhole shooting perpetuated by cops will not be investigated.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Pedgerow » Thu Apr 11, 2019 12:20 am

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:Looks like a gummy ring.


It's the first ever photo. We have nothing to compare it to, and no idea what it should look like. It also looks like someone applied a Photoshop filter to a snap of their own anus. Now, I'm not saying that it definitely isn't a picture of a black hole; it's just that it might not be the black hole they claim it is. After all, these are scientists; they are smart people. They must know that this is the only chance they'll ever get to dupe the entire world into fawning over a photo of one of their bumholes.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Windy » Thu Apr 11, 2019 2:28 pm

What's to stop me from pointing at any random empty point in space and call it a black hole?
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby cmsellers » Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:31 pm

Windy wrote:What's to stop me from pointing at any random empty point in space and call it a black hole?

Absolutely nothing.

Getting people to believe you, however, may be more difficult.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Absentia » Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:57 pm

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/forget-the-black-hole-picture-check-out-the-sweet-technology-that-made-it-possible/

Short piece from 538 describing the advanced algorithms that made the image possible, and their potential practical applications.

TLDR is that this could be a major advancement for computer imaging in medicine and in AI technology like self-driving cars.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Windy » Thu Apr 11, 2019 9:07 pm

Yes, I too am impressed at the ingenuity of attaching a telescope to a camera and pointing it into space.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Absentia » Thu Apr 11, 2019 9:52 pm

It's a combined image from ten different radio (not optical) telescopes. There's no picture without a computer to process the radio signals into a visual. And in this case all they had to work with was incomplete pieces of a signal from 55 mly away.

I mean, if you think it's easy you should definitely let MIT know you figured it out for them. No sense having all those grad students working on something you've already solved.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:44 pm

***OBLIGATORY JOKE ABOUT "YOUR MOTHER'S" BLACK HOLE***

Now that that's out of the way. I especially like how one article I read mentioned we can see more light at the bottom because it's moving toward us.

I'd have headed straight for the liquor if I thought I had a few more million billion years left. Instead I just chuckled because that'll be the quantum technorganic people's problem.

I use the term people loosely.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Apr 12, 2019 2:31 am

KleinerKiller wrote:
Spoiler: show
Image


Enhance...

Enhance...

Enhance...

one ring.jpg
one ring.jpg (123.67 KiB) Viewed 6176 times


Mother of God. They found it.
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby cmsellers » Fri Apr 12, 2019 2:55 am

If even a black hole can't destroy the one ring, what hope did a volcano ever have?
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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Apr 12, 2019 5:57 am

Cool image but for the record we have known black holes exist for a long time. They are difficult to observe directly but we have discovered gravitational waves which were caused by black holes merging.

Somewhat related, the black hole in Interstellar was created after consulting physicists and the software they created to model it was so groundbreaking it resulted in the publication of three scientific papers.

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Re: First image taken of black hole -- ALSO BLACK HOLES EXIS

Postby AboveGL » Fri Apr 12, 2019 8:41 pm

I watched a couple of Veritesium videos on this. It's the coolest shit ever. The gravitational lensing is just awesome as hell.
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