Pretty good video for my layman brain in trying to explain what we’re looking at in the image.
Pretty good video for my layman brain in trying to explain what we’re looking at in the image.
Am I right in thinking that the halo there is light being bent?
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Oh is the point where I post that I work at the place where EHT is based and worked directly on the Chandra X-ray observations of this campaign? Because if so, there you go. Here's a link to our observations, which are much more spatially resolved than the radio observations.
http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2019/bla...Ami5g0ktyNVB54
@Zealot Yes. This what we see is gravitationally lensed photons. There was a really cool animation during the press release showing the flow of photons around the SMBH that then rotated to show that they produce the face-on image that we see. Worth going back to the video and scrolling to it.
Side note: This was really cool for me. I was working with LIGO during the first BH-BH merger in 2015 and was able to be at the press release on site at Livingston. Now I've worked on this EHT campaign (from the X-ray side) and was able to be here on site for this press release. I keep somehow stumbling forward into really cool opportunities despite being an incredibly lazy asshole.
It was mentioned in the video, but the EHT campaign was not only M87, but also Sgr A* which is the SMBH at the center of our galaxy (the Milky Way). That data has not been released to the public yet but should be Soon(TM). Keep your eyes out. We caught a flare during one of our Sgr A* observations with roughly ~30x brightness increase in the X-ray. I *think* that the UV observatories AND ALMA also caught it at the same time. It will make for a really compelling result for the Sgr A* image.
Edit: JK I found the email from Sera Markoff from a while back. Here's some insider info cuz I like you guys:
"I have some good news: Michael confirmed the exact range on 11 April was 09:00-15:01 (09:00-14:03 included ALMA!). So we caught the end of the flare period as well, and the u-v coverage will be potentially good enough to do imaging or at least check for evolution in the structure. I think this is very interesting, even if we don’t see anything it will put pressure on some scenarios. But if we do see something, this could be extremely useful for detailed modeling of the accretion flow around Sgr A* and help a lot with the interpretation!"
Nice Sath! You are our inside man.
btw, I think the wide field image with the Black Hole at the center is awesome too.
Holy crap that is awesome. Thanks for sharing the images from your work. I like the wider field of view images. It is so mind boggling to me that these objects warp reality so much it is hard to understand truly what is going on. The video above did a good job but still the idea that you could look forward and see the back of your own head etc. is fascinating. I am excited to see what they learn from the data that was gathered.
https://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/20...-you-do-today/
Short interview with one of the persons who made this possible.
Katie Bouman was in high school in Indiana when she first learned about the Event Horizon Telescope. As a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she helped create an algorithm that helped devise imaging methods to piece together data from the system.
“We didn’t want to just develop one algorithm. We wanted to develop many different algorithms that all have different assumptions built into them. If all of them recover the same general structure, then that builds your confidence,” she told CNN.
“No one of us could’ve done it alone,” Bouman said. “It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds.”
I saw a photo of her in front of 5 Petabytes worth of data stored in a huge stack of HDD's was pretty cool to think of the sheer volume of data captured.
Someone in the press conference touched on this, but it should be emphasized how much this project could never have been possible without all the work from grad students and post docs. Projects like this require tens of thousands of man hours that tenured faculty and staff scientists just do not have. The majority of the actual on the ground work is done by kids who generally dont know what the fuck and are trying their best to learn on the fly.
Groundbreaking science isn’t made by an elite few. It happens on the backs of all the people who didn’t listen to the smoothbrain chorus of “college is a scam and waste of money lol” and kept their heads down and applied themselves. This level of physics and math is not intuitive. No person is inherently better or worse, or more talented, at the level these people are working at. It is pure, unadulterated, application of time and effort.
Next time you see someone whip off a “college is a scam” because they are a lazy cockwad, smack them in the mouth for me.
Hear hear! Well said.
The people that think like that do so because they don't see something like this applying to them now or at any point.
I've been following this shit forever and I think it's awesome. The Reddit threads provide some great insight too as well as casual speak and descriptions like the YouTube posted by Xno. There's also a simulation of two black holes merging that caused the waves and I watched that shit a bunch it's mesmerizing.
omg I just now noticed Google's homepage. XD I randomly checked it to test something and I'm glad I did it will probably change back after midnight.
Edit: It is still up. If your reading this go to Google right now!
Mmm I'm not sure higher image resolution will actually matter here. This is real data just heat mapped for color. Our spatial resolution on the CCD cameras (ACIS instrument) as close to the aimpoint as possible, where the point-spread function is minimized, is ~0.5 arcseconds, which is 0.000277778 degrees on the sky. It's incredibly good, orders and orders of magnitude better than ROSAT, XMM, Swift, etc, but what it comes down to is that this resolution translates to 40 parsecs per pixel on a 1024x1024 pixel CCD. I think the FOV for our image is ~58,000 parsecs across. I think the best you're going to get is the .tif image that you can download on the right hand side of this page http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2019/black_hole/
By contrast, Hubble (which is designed to do deep highly spatially resolved optical observations) is 0.64 megapixels
Fun fact:
In explaining the above, I just found an error in the press release for the Chandra images of M87. The conversion from arcminutes to light years quoted for the wide field is off by a factor of 10 lmao. It should be ~50 (call it 50 anyway) kpc across and the LY width they quote corresponds to 500kpc.
O O P S
Edit: I just ran down to talk to the head of the public outreach division and had her redo the calculation in front of me and yeah, off by a factor of 10. It'll be fixed soon lol.
Just...I feel like it's worth noting that the Katie Bouman pictures side by side with the picture of the woman who wrote the orbital dynamics code is...disingenuous to say the very, very least.
I know Katie. I like her. She is good person and a good scientist.
She is 100% being used by the media in this case though. The equivalence being made is pretty terrible. Her career has 100% been made now though, she has an open door anywhere at anytime which is awesome - but yeah...