Me too. We’ve literally just been talking about black holes in my intro astro class, so this couldn’t be better timing.
It’s something I would have dreamed about as a kid. I never would have though that this would happen in my lifetime.
I’m relatively excited. But I am worried that my interest will be sucked away.
-xtien
Nice. :)
Perhaps something to get you primed:
It’s an exciting idea, but doesn’t the nature of black holes mean it’s going to be: “see that dark spot there? That’s a black hole!”?
-xtien
See my post immediately above yours. Short answer: no, because while the black hole itself emits nothing but very faint Hawking radiation, the material falling into it is very, very luminous.
Glad to see Veritasium on top of this!
What’s not really mentioned is that they spent months and months and months analyzing the data and cleaning out all the noise. They then gave the data to three separate teams to generate the image. Each team using a different approach. And each team not communicating to one another, so no “contamination” of the results.
So, yeah, I want to see the output from each team.
This is an extreme case, but it’s worth everyone understanding that this is to some extent true of literally every astronomical picture you’ve likely ever seen. Raw data is a mess of hot pixels, cosmic ray collisions, zodiacal light, and any number of other things.
Well, it took them an extra long time because of how many telescopes were involved.
Exactly. And of course since we’re talking about Sgr A* it’s also a “noisy neighborhood” and the line of sight is itself troublesome.
For those interested, here’s a pretty typical image (in radio emission - long wavelengths are all that get through the intervening dust) of the center of the galaxy. Sgr A* is noted on here, but you can’t “see” it at this resolution.
The photo has been leaked early.
RON, HOWARD!!!
Lets just hope this data from January is wrong where it is suggested the jets maybe pointed… at us… GULP.
“However, that would make Sagittarius A* an exception compared to other radio-emitting black holes. The alternative could be that the radio jet is pointing almost at us.”
Issaoun’s supervisor Heino Falcke, professor of radio astronomy at Radboud University, calls this very unusual, but he also no longer rules it out.
SpaceX will be making their 2nd Falcon Heavy launch tomorrow at 6:35 PM EDT.
Watching the side booster land side by side was a thrill, this time hopefully the center core will also be successful
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EHT announcement stream: