I'm truly in awe at this. I just looked at a picture of the black hole in the center of M87. It is mindblowingly far away, and one of the most exotic things in the universe.
I honestly never thought that we'd do something like this in my lifetime.
100 years ago we didn't know that black holes existed. In essentially one human lifetime we went from not knowing something existed to building a planet-sized telescope to look at it. It is so far away that while we can put numbers on it, it's still just an abstraction because we can't really understand the scale of what we're dealing with.
Think of how far 1000 miles or 1000 km really is. Imagine driving that. Imagine walking that. Now slap 11 zeros onto that. No, not "imagine it 11 times", 11 orders of magnitude larger. Imagine that 1000 miles/km is the width of a human hair. Slice the earth and half and lay them down to span the diameter of the earth. That's ballpark the scale that we're talking about. Imagine how many hairs it would take to span the diameter of the earth. It's an unfathomable number. That's how many times 1000 miles away this thing is.
When the light left the accretion disk around this black hole, the K-T extinction event was relatively recent history.
And with SpaceX seriously cutting launch costs, and potentially being able to reliably reach past the moon's orbit, we'll likely have telescopes with an effective resolution larger than the earth in the not-too-distant future, and we'll be able to image this and other things in even higher resolution.
No thanks for the nye/tyson imitation. All I wanna know is how you modded yourself up to 'insightful' without your conscience screaming THIS IS WROOONG! in your head.
I've walked 800 km before, took 26 days straight.:)
That's a slow pace. In WWII the 506th PIR completed a 115 mile forced march in 31 hours. That's a pace of 6 km an hour, with full combat gear. Even cutting that pace by 2/3 gets you 800km in less than 20 days.
And if you can not drive all the way to M87 without stopping for refueling, the battery cars are no good. All that talk about carbon emissions, and Elon is still using chemical burning rockets! If he is so smart why didn't he design an electric rocket, eh? He sneaked an electric car into orbit riding on the same old fossil fuel powered rocket, and all his fans are going ga-ga over it fooled into thinking that spaceman roadster got up there on its own electric charge. geez.
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm truly in awe at this. I just looked at a picture of the black hole in the center of M87. It is mindblowingly far away, and one of the most exotic things in the universe.
I honestly never thought that we'd do something like this in my lifetime.
100 years ago we didn't know that black holes existed. In essentially one human lifetime we went from not knowing something existed to building a planet-sized telescope to look at it. It is so far away that while we can put numbers on it, it's still just an abstraction because we can't really understand the scale of what we're dealing with.
Think of how far 1000 miles or 1000 km really is. Imagine driving that. Imagine walking that. Now slap 11 zeros onto that. No, not "imagine it 11 times", 11 orders of magnitude larger. Imagine that 1000 miles/km is the width of a human hair. Slice the earth and half and lay them down to span the diameter of the earth. That's ballpark the scale that we're talking about. Imagine how many hairs it would take to span the diameter of the earth. It's an unfathomable number. That's how many times 1000 miles away this thing is.
When the light left the accretion disk around this black hole, the K-T extinction event was relatively recent history.
And with SpaceX seriously cutting launch costs, and potentially being able to reliably reach past the moon's orbit, we'll likely have telescopes with an effective resolution larger than the earth in the not-too-distant future, and we'll be able to image this and other things in even higher resolution.
Holy shit are we an incredible species.
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No thanks for the nye/tyson imitation. All I wanna know is how you modded yourself up to 'insightful' without your conscience screaming THIS IS WROOONG! in your head.
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I've walked 800 km before, took 26 days straight. :)
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I've walked 800 km before, took 26 days straight. :)
That's a slow pace. In WWII the 506th PIR completed a 115 mile forced march in 31 hours. That's a pace of 6 km an hour, with full combat gear. Even cutting that pace by 2/3 gets you 800km in less than 20 days.
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to building a planet-sized telescope
That is taking liberties with the poetic license.