Black Hole Picture Captured For First Time in Space 'Breakthrough' (theguardian.com) 322
Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself -- a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape -- is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists. Sheperd Doeleman, Event Horizon Telescope Director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: "Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole's accretion disk, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily "feeds" the monster within. A video stream of the press conference.
Article or it didn't happen? (Score:2)
Article or it didn't happen? No source article?
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That was weird. Before my first post, there was no link. About a minute after, the link showed up.
Re:Article or it didn't happen? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Article or it didn't happen? (Score:5, Funny)
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https://youtu.be/Dr20f19czeE
The live press conference is the source of any article which will be linked, for now
Re:Article or it didn't happen? (Score:5, Informative)
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Thanks!
Bravo! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope they keep on working....after all black holes are among the very few mysteries left to figure out and a possible source of development of "new physics". I was rather crushed that the LHC did not find anything new....confirming the Higgs was great but expected....I was hoping for new mysteries that might lead to something Sci-Fi like such as teleportation or FTL travel. Ahhh, reality is a harsh mistress!
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It would have been very interesting if for instance, the Higgs Boson also comes in generations like the leptons, or if we had something like a strange Higgs and a top Higgs.
Re:Bravo! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, there's no lack of mysteries. There's still no data at all on what dark matter actually is, beyond "matter, cold, interacts weakly". Dark energy is just as mysterious. Heck, even inflation, which has been a primary focus of cosmology for over a decade, is merely a well-studied mystery.
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If you're really interested in science, you should check out the work of these folks:
Viktor Shauberger [youtube.com].
Walter Russell [youtube.com]
Alan Watts [youtube.com] (just a link to a youtube search of his name)
Then finish it all off with Patanjali [youtube.com]
I'm certain that science will eventually understand how these men did what they did. But at that point, "science" will be more about the internal reality, and less about the external world.
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Not sure how this is "new age", these guys are all long gone, dead.
Viktor Schauberger observed trout in a stream and wondered why the fish doesn't have to swim like hell to stay steady in the stream (the stream doesn't push the fish down the stream, as it does with other material in the stream). So he wondered what the mechanism was that held the fish there. He eventually discovered that it's the shape of the fish that enables this. He noticed that the fish has the same shape when looked at from the fron
Finally putting an end.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you, science... hopefully I seen the last of this argument from ignorance.
Re:Finally putting an end.... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, the era of people not knowing how to infer has just ended. Congrats on the new era's first post! That was exquisite timing; I'm jealous.
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I never said that... it's just that this argument is one that I've seen used a lot by people who doubted the existence of black holes, and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.
I'm sure it won't stop them from coming up with some other reason to doubt it, but this is one I've heard *repeatedly*, from literally every single person I've ever met who didn't think they existed.
Re:Finally putting an end.... (Score:5, Insightful)
and now, at least, they can't use that argument anymore.
Oh you sweet summer child.
If knowledge were sufficient to remove idiocy, we'd have been rid of it centuries ago. The only thing more frustrating than arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they cannot use basic reason, is arguing with a fool who makes bad arguments because they ignore all evidence.
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Obviously they can doubt the veracity of the photographs, but they can't actually say that we haven't claimed to have actually seen photographs of them.
*THAT* is the argument from ignorance that I've repeatedly heard from absolutely anyone I've ever met who has taken the stance of not believing in the existence of black holes.
Now we have photographs... or at least are claiming to... whether those idiots believe that they are actual photos of real black holes is irrelevant, they can't say that nobody's
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Now we have. Whether they believe in the veracity of the photo is irrelevant... they cannot use that argument anymore.
If they want to persist in the delusion, they will have to now argue that there is a conspiracy or a coverup or that this evidence was artificially manufactured.
But they can't say that we haven't taken any pictures of
Re:You don't know anything about how it was taken. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you completely missed my point.... When the subject comes up, I have maintained for at least the past two decades that black holes really do exist. I have gotten into rather heated discussions on this subject with many people, and *BY FAR*, the most frequent objection I have heard from others to their existence is that we supposedly can't know they exist because we can't see them. This is an argument from ignorance, and is one that I absolutely loathe.
Obviously other no less ignorant arguments might exist, but hopefully this particular one can finally be put to bed.
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Here's my ignorant argument:
We are outside of the black holes we might see.
We see things close to the event horizon slow down and come to a complete stop when they reach the horizon.
So just before a black hole forms, stuff as seen by an outside observer slows down. The instant of formation of the hole, everything at the horizon is stopped.
So from the outside view, all we see is an image that is asymptotically approaching the state of being a black hole. It can never get there.
Tell me why I'm wrong. I'm no p
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That popular explanation is actually wrong. Indeed things slow and are red shifted from our point of view as they fall towards event horizon, BUT the event horizon also is growing and eventually engulfs those things. That's the part often left out. Black holes grow, even to outside observers. Things get engulfed and disappear into the event horizon in the case of a growing black hole, even to outside observers if they wait long enough. The event horizon even from our point of view is not frozen in si
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OK, but how did the outside view of the hole ever get to us? How can a stopped thing (in our reference frame) grow?
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the event horizon is not a "stopped thing"
black holes do grow from our frame of reference as things fall in, actually it's wrong to say things slow down as they approach the event horizon, instead the event horizon grows to engulf those things as they are slowing. The simplistic explanations of things falling into black holes in popular press are wrong.
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Did it grow, or did it come into being at the size it is? Are we seeing the cruft around an age 0 core, or is something else going on that I haven't understood?
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We still haven't imaged a black hole. All we've managed to do is image a black hole's accretion disk.
In addition, LIGO has captured a few brief snapshots of black holes getting jiggy. But I'd wait another year on that one, until we're extra sure that the sophisticated LIGO software isn't taking phantom snapshots of it's own software-filter afterimage.
Perhaps you should begin by schooling the Hillbillies in the community hot tub whom you persistently engage what it means for modern science to "image" somethi
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Re:You don't know anything about how it was taken. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of us have never seen Donald Trump in person, so any images we have seen of him are blurry blob of colors from number crunching a vast amount of data. And yet we all know what we are seeing and trust that he's real. Your problem appears to be that you don't trust math. That's your problem, don't hang it on us.
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You just described seeing. Congratulations! So yes, you really do see things, since that is what we call that procedure you described.
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Today I learned... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a movie and book (Score:3)
If you watch the Werner Herzog documentary/movie "Encounters at the End of the World" they have an interview with the guy that runs the telescope, and also some footage - pretty cool.
There's also a whole book around it though pretty dense, called The Telescope in the Ice [telescopeintheice.com] if you want to know more.
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Next, we need a moon base with a 10m scope. Then, we can can get much better pictures without so much worry about the weather.
Re:Today I learned... (Score:4, Interesting)
The earth-moon L4 and L5 points would be better. That would give us an effective dish size a bit larger than the earth-moon distance, and the scopes could be pointed in more directions. Probably easier to get a scope to as well, as landing is never a trivial endeavor.
It's not easy (Score:4, Informative)
I can't even get a decent photo of my black cat.
Re:It's not easy (Score:4, Funny)
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They didn't use 8 scopes for 8 months. They spent 8 months waiting for all of them to have clear weather. If we had a decent moon base, it would have scope that never had to wait for clear weather, and could be combined with the ones on Earth to create "the largest telescope in the solar system".
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Except for the little problems of bandwidth and synchronization.
How to interpret the image (Score:5, Interesting)
Veritasium did an excellent summary of how to understand and interpret what you're seeing in the image. Before the image was actually posted, he drew what all the models were anticipating, and you can see a lot of the features he spoke about in the actual image.
YouTube [youtube.com]
When I saw the movie Interstellar, their image of a black hole seemed really hokey, but there's a reason for the way they drew it and it seems like parts of their conceptualization holds up fairly well.
Re:How to interpret the image (Score:5, Informative)
The black hole from Interstellar is actually NOT a "concept drawing", it was rendered by a relativistic ray tracing software. There is even a refereed paper in a scientific journal about the code (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001). Only the relativistic color and brightness shift of the disc were left out because they were deemed too confusing for the movie audience.
Thanks fo the video (Score:2)
I had been wondering, why it was that we seemed to be so lucky as to be looking exactly above the accretion disc... watching the video helped to understand why the angle didn't matter so much.
Discovery! (Score:2, Funny)
This is where all the Tax Money goes.
Re:Discovery! (Score:4, Informative)
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. This entire endeavor was about $50-60 million, about half of which was directly funded by the NSF (tax money). By comparison, just one F-35 fighter jet is about $100 million.
I'm rather proud of myself :) (Score:3)
After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
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After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
The Register [theregister.co.uk] could not resist in their reporting and made that joke for you.
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I'm still waiting for a group of shitlord astronomers to officially name a Goatse Nebula and a Goatse Galaxy.
And taking this train of thought further, I propose that 46 Capricorni be declared Goat C (considering the Capricorn constellation can be called the Goat.)
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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Nietzsche (Score:2)
" ... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Clear skies ? (Score:2)
FTFA "The success of the project hinged on clear skies on several continents simultaneously and exquisite coordination between the eight far-flung teams."
Why are clear skies a requirement of a radio telescope? Or is this just the popular press version of a science story?
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Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.
Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.
Re:Orange Halo (Score:4, Informative)
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Orange Halo with a large black hole in the middle? Yeah, the model fits... it does, it does...
Re:2018 (Score:5, Informative)
1. Uh, you DO realize Hugh Hefner died in 2017 right?
2. His last name is Hawking
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What happens when you look at a sphere from a very long ways away?
It resembles a flat disk.
What happens when you look at the event horizon of a black hole from a very long ways away?
It resembles a flat disk. Because it's a sphere.
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It's a post to someone who thinks black holes can't exist at all. "Sphere" is close enough.
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I think a diagnosis on his terminal stupidity is in order. He knows nothing about physics, knows nothing about why that ring of gas can be seen, and why that casts a shadow of the event horizon.
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The actual black hole itself cannot be imaged. Light falling through the event horizon is pretty much gone (what exactly happens to it is still a mystery, and one of the problems of not having a unified theory encompassing GR and QM). But what has been seen is the shadow of the event horizon.
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If it cannot be imaged, you do not have an image of a black hole. Rather, you have an image of something other than a black hole.
Re:Picture of stuff that may be around a black hol (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Picture of stuff that may be around a black ho (Score:5, Informative)
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question... aRTee
That is much of what you are seeing. The ring you see in their photo is the accretion disk, but it is actually the back top and bottom of the accretion disk behind the black hole that shows up due to gravitational lensing. The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge. The bright area of the ring is the side spinning towards us and the dim away from us. The accretion disk probably goes through the center of the shadow and the dim part between the two brighter spots. Perpendicular to that, you can see faint areas outside the black hole that are probably the jets. The black area is the shadow, basically, the area where light from behind is dragged into the black hole. This is 2.6 times the size of the actual black hole's event horizon. This is a very fuzzy image made from different pictures with a resolution of a bit smaller the size of the shadow we are seeing. That's what I've learned in the last half hour of watching you tube videos explaining what they expect to see and how to interpret it anyhow.
Re:Picture of stuff that may be around a black hol (Score:5, Funny)
Right, just like I say every time I see the picture of a cat. "Is it really a picture of a cat, or just the light bouncing off a cat?" ...
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I always figured the term black whole refers to the entire structure; singularity, accretion disk, event horizon, relativistic jets (is that what they really call those? Pretty cool if so), etc. So we do get to see the black hole, except for certain parts of it, like the singularity and anything behind the outer layer of the event horizon.
I guess a simple analogy would be that you consist of the visible you and what is beneath the skin. Unless you find a way to bend light around yourself, we still see yo
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Well, the only reason it's a question you can't wrap your mind around is because it's a question that has stopped having an answer beyond "nothing." Sight is the sensation you get when your brain interprets photons hitting your retina. In a singularity, light cannot escape to hit your retinas (ignoring the fact that your retinas can't exist there either), so how could you possibly see anything?
It's kind of like asking, "what would a bunch of astronauts clapping sound like to another astronaut in space?"
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It's a picture of the stuff around the black hole being occluded by the black hole's event horizon.
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It's a picture that even includes stuff behind the black hole. Check out this video [youtube.com].
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Exactly, there's no truth in advertising!
Re:Picture of stuff that may be around a black hol (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it really a picture of a black hole, or is it just a picture of the stuff surrounding something purported to be a black hole?
If you take a picture of a hole in the ground, is it really a picture of the hole, or just a picture of the stuff surrounding the hole? Do you routinely question the existence of holes in the ground?
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And Sagittarius A is probably the reason the deep time civilizations on the opposite haven't been able to easily get over to our spiral arm. The gravitational effects from S-a kept flinging them way off course so they could only get over this way by sheer luck.
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Should have been on the opposite side of the galaxy. Java error on my part (as in was not finished with the first cup).
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I reflect light. Black holes do not. I submit you cannot photograph a black hole because it is, after all, a black hole.
Re:Pic was not "captured" but computer generated (Score:5, Informative)
it was not "captured" but computer generated. this is no photo. radio telescopes don't take pictures, they record waves. Am I wrong?
True, and optical telescopes (mk 1 eyeball being the lowest technology example) just record em waves too. Most of the best cameras these days use computer chips to generate the image. So it seems like any other camera to me, just with a bit of a different lens and processing system.
Re:Pic was not "captured" but computer generated (Score:4, Informative)
Um, even cameras record waves. The radio telescope is able to detect photons outside the human visual spectrum range, but they are still photons.
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This just becomes a game of definitions. I could take a picture, shift the visible light well into the UV spectrum, and to my mind, it's still a picture, just in the part of the spectrum human eyes can't detect. By, I suppose, the most restricted definition of a "picture", that is an image that, with reasonable accuracy, reproduces the spectra actually reflected or emitted in the real world object, it isn't a picture. But then, would a black and white photo be a picture, since it doesn't record a large amou
Radio is just as photonic as light... (Score:3)
Radio behaves exactly the same as all other EM radiation, we just think of the various types in different terms - e.g. gamma and X-ray are generally thought of in energy units (eV), UV/visible/IR in wavelength (nm), and microwave/radio in frequency (Hz).
The famous 21-cm hydrogen line, detected by radio telescope at 1420MHz, is a well-understood quantum phenomenon and is definitely an emission of a photon It's just detected electronically, rather than by a photochemical reaction of a silver halide on film. S
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There is no difference between an x-ray photon, and a (let's call it) red photon, other than the energy of the photon.
They are both photons. They are both particles, and they are both waves.
X-ray photography against a plate, is that not a picture or is it?
An HDR image from your phone camera, is that not a picture, or is it?
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still, photo use photons... this is a picture ok, but no photo. i may be wrong... thanks, for your enlightenment ;) !
Radio waves are still electromagnetic radiation. The particles associated with radio waves are still photons.
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According to your logic, neither your phone nor digital cameras take pictures.
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Digital cameras record waves, and computer-generate an image from those waves.
Radio telescopes record waves, and computer-generate in image from those waves.
The only difference is the frequency of the photons captured by the detector.
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Even the human eye just uses waves to change the stereo
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If my phone had the resolution of these radio telescopes it would. However, my phone's resolution is much lower.
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A "photo" as you are using the term is merely captured, computer processed waves in a chunk of spectrum we call "the visible spectrum".
This is actually a bunch of "photos" of not-visible spectrum waves combined and processed using VLIB to get a synthetic aperture size larger than any single "camera" aperture.
If this is not a picture, then neither is any picture produced by any camera in the world, and beyond that, nor do you see.
If you want to be less pedantic, then if this is not a picture, then n
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As always the only REAL truth to be found is in the Bible
Posts as AC.
I recall something about the necessity to "proclaim your Christian faith". No?
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The Unix Bible?
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You DO realize that there is more then one religion, right?
Re: Science, Agendas and Lies (Score:2)
Is it the one in the orginal Attic Greek, or Latin, or the KJV, or NKJV. Do you include the Apocrypha?
Re: Science, Agendas and Lies (Score:4, Funny)
You haven't really read the bible until you've read it in the original Klingon.
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LOL! Nice.
The HBO TV series True Blood used a similar joke with the "Book of the Vampyr" aka the original (vampire) bible older then OT. Which is kind of ironic that the Judaic Torah completely censored Lilith, Adams first wife, before Eve hijacked the narrative.
Apparently the mods are extremely cranky today or woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Ask a legitimate question and get marked as troll. LOL. Guess someone is hyper-sensitive that their belief isn't the only perspective and too insecure to admit
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If you had 6bn suns rammed in, yours would be irritated, too.
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So much humor potential in this story; so little time.
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Some of us understand that radio telescopes record (capture) radio waves, not visible light.
So? In terms of physics, the difference between radio waves and visible light is arbitrary - "visible light" is just the frequency/wavelength range that humans can see. The range of "visible light" is different for different animals. They're both electromagnetic radiation and they both behave the same way.