I don’t know what it is, but it really seems like over the last 5 years things have finally started to feel like we’re living in the future for the first time. Smartphones, smart speakers, contactless payments and apps for everything, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR. Even flying cars are almost a thing. This is the nightmare dystopian side of that feeling.
antlers
2948
You know what would be a useful use for this technology?
Fly it over North Korea with the Korean for “DPRK is Corrupt” or “Kim Jong Eun is a murderer.”
Plus, in North Korea you’re guaranteed dark skies for maximum visibility.
Menzo
2949
I’m actually almost sure this is a joke. If it’s not a joke, then Pepsi corporate will certainly kill it within 24 hours.
This and Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple and Monsanto and Goldman and… Cyberpunk was not supposed to be a guide.
Need to start working on my hacking skills so I can project the glory of Dickbutt to the world.
jpinard
2952
Want to get angry?
If you burrow down into the misogynists doing this, OMG it is infuriating. These people need to be flushed off the face of this planet. I just can’t imagine what kind of slime ridden snail licking scum would work so hard to try and discredit a young women for doing such a great job. And she never took all the credit for herself, but that won’t stop these neanderthals.
Tman
2953
On this cube sat thing for advertising, This will utterly destroy the night sky for amateur astronomers. I don’t see how this can be allowed to occur - unless they only allow it during / near full moons.
the night sky is something we hold dear. It’s hard enough with the moon and urban lights. Putting something like that up there will be taking away a significant chunk of what you can view overhead.
Oghier
2954
I think the future is going to produce more incels/ basement-dwelling misogynists, not fewer. None of the trends that have increased their numbers and visibility appear to be waning.
We just have to outshout them when needed, ignore them when possible and absolutely outvote them every time we can.
Russia does have a history of insane commercial space engineering proposals that don’t go anywhere. Remember that guy who was going to create permanent sunlight in a Russian city with a ginormous space mirror? So even if it isn’t a joke, don’t be surprised if nothing happens. It certainly shouldn’t be allowed to, but I don’t have great faith in Russia’s conscientiousness.
I was wondering and it seems like there are some physics buffs on these forums :) I only have a light understanding of Special Relativity from high school but I still tried reading about Relativistic beaming that he mentions affects the brightness (observed luminosity?) of the accretion disk in the video. The wikipedia article explains the following:
Blue- or redshifting can change the observed luminosity at a particular frequency, but this is not a beaming effect.
Why doesn’t this also affect the color of the accretion disk (making it blue and bright on one side and red and dim on the other) or are the radio waves the images are based on not analyzed to produce color? As far as I remember the stars we can see are mostly redshifted (maybe excluding stars in Andromeda) due to the expanding universe and there shouldn’t be any difference to light that is reflected or emitted?
BTW, here is their follow-up video covering the released photo.
This. This is a “just count every photon you can lay a hand to” situation. It’s a false color heat map where black is “no/few photons” red is “some photons” and yellow is “comparitively many photons.” Nothing more to it.
Miramon
2959
Yeah, the news reports can call that a “photograph” all they like, but it’s an image rendered from data, and not from optical image data, either.
schurem
2960
But it is. Is not an image a repduction of relative densities of photon distribution?
FWIW during the initial announcement the astronomers talked about photons of light leaving the black hole’s area and how the light was collected the telescopes.
I’ve realized that I’ve always for some reason thought of radio waves and other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum as being something completely different from visible light (and near visible infrared and ultraviolet). But they’re all part of the same spectrum; our eyes don’t do anything magical with the wavelengths which we can see.
If visible light is made of photons (spoiler: it isn’t, not really or at least not probably, but acts like it is often enough that we can think of it as being photons under certain conditions) then all other parts of the EM spectrum are also made of the same things, just operating at different wavelengths.
Caveat: I’m neither a physicist nor an astronomer.
Or, what @schurem said. :P
Matt_W
2962
It’s precisely the same as a black and white digital photo, except that it represents light intensity across a wider range of frequencies.
Visible light is made of photons, by definition. A photon is a thing that light is made of.
Menzo
2963
As expected. Pepsi execs not thrilled for a no-name Russian company using their name to push their bullshit projects.
Miramon
2964
Visible light, like all electromagnetic radiation, is composed exclusively of photons when the light is regarded as particles. You can also regard it as waves, but it’s not the case that light isn’t really particulate in nature. It’s really particle and wave at the same time, with different experiments and phenomena reacting to one or the other nature of light.
But I really wanted Pepsi to give me a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure
