Black Hole Photo May Also Have Captured Light From Around the Universe (nytimes.com) 29
"When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don't just see the swirling sizzling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in," reports the New York Times. "You can also see the whole universe."
Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope. "The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not unlike the rings that form around your bathtub drain.
Dr. Johnson was lead author of a study, describing the proposed method that would allow our telescopes to pry more secrets from the maw of any black hole, that was published in the March 18 edition of the journal Science Advances. He and other authors of the paper are also members of the team operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a globe-girding network of radio telescopes that made that first image of a black hole. Their telescope saw these rings, but it didn't have enough resolution to distinguish them, so they were blurred into a single feature.... Andrew Strominger, a Harvard theorist and co-author of the paper, said, "Understanding the intricate details of this historic experimental observation has forced theorists like myself to think about black holes in a new way..."
As Peter Galison of Harvard, another E.H.T. collaborator said, "As we peer into these rings, we are looking at light from all over the visible universe, we are seeing farther and farther into the past, a movie, so to speak, of the history of the visible universe."
Dr. Johnson was lead author of a study, describing the proposed method that would allow our telescopes to pry more secrets from the maw of any black hole, that was published in the March 18 edition of the journal Science Advances. He and other authors of the paper are also members of the team operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a globe-girding network of radio telescopes that made that first image of a black hole. Their telescope saw these rings, but it didn't have enough resolution to distinguish them, so they were blurred into a single feature.... Andrew Strominger, a Harvard theorist and co-author of the paper, said, "Understanding the intricate details of this historic experimental observation has forced theorists like myself to think about black holes in a new way..."
As Peter Galison of Harvard, another E.H.T. collaborator said, "As we peer into these rings, we are looking at light from all over the visible universe, we are seeing farther and farther into the past, a movie, so to speak, of the history of the visible universe."
Re:I don't read NY Times articles (Score:5, Informative)
Press F9 to fuck NY Times' paywall.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I don't read NY Times articles (Score:5, Informative)
To read any NYT page off the home page. First load the home page in private mode, scroll to the bottom to have all the dynamic content updated. Disallow the sub-domain above, read any sub-page.
Re: (Score:3)
Or, you know, pay for a subscription to get the content and provide a salary to the people generating it.
The NYT site allows a certain number of articles to be read for free w/o a subscription or account, but not at all in Private mode, which I use frequently, because they detect that, for some reason and Firefox allow them to do that. This is simply a workaround for that situation. I was just describing a "tool" how it's used or not is something else.
Don't want to do that? So then you give your work away for free, do you? Oh, that's right, you have a job where you get paid for your skills and your time. Show some spine and do the same for others.
I actually do give some of my work away for free, even to my part-time employer.
Re: (Score:2)
Or, you know, pay for a subscription to get the content and provide a salary to the people generating it.
This! After paying for subscriptions to The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Medium, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, my wife divorced me, but at least I still have enough money left over after alimony payments to support the entire news industry!
Now if only I could eat digital websites the same way I used to eat newspapers when I was starving...
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The easiest solution is to just use two browsers - one for normal usage, and one that is used only in non-private mode to read paywalled articles. Getting around the paywall restriction is as simple as clicking "Clear history".
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But you can see things circling the drain there.
Reality... (Score:2)
What a concept.
^C^V (Score:1)
For the paywall impaired...
Out There
Infinite Visions Were Hiding in the First Black Hole Image’s Rings
Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable.
The first image image of a black hole, taken by the Event Horizon Telescope and released to the world last April. “The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings,” said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The first image image of a black hole, taken by the E
answer please - (Score:5, Funny)
This is so cool ! Truly news for nerds. But I have a question and I'm sure a Slashdot nerd has the answer. Regarding this statement:
"The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not unlike the rings that form around your bathtub drain."
. . . Are those rings circling clockwise or counter-clockwise ?
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"The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," ...
They actually meant "turtles" not "rings".
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In astrophysics, everything is orbiting counter-clockwise, except retrograde orbits. Not even joking, it's just a handy convention to have (no doubt picked because the Earth rotates and orbits counter-clockwise when viewed from above the norther hemisphere). I keep waiting for Rocket Labs, which launches from New Zealand, to screw up and launch the wrong way.
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Presumably both. It would depend entirely on the side of the black hole that the photon approached.
For a literal example, consider gravitational lensing. Light that passes the top/bottom of a black hole is bent "inward" -- not down or up. (Same for light going around the side.) It doesn't make sense to me that either the light would sharply curve if approaching one side and meet up with light that went straight to the other side, thus going the same direction, nor that light approaching one side would slowl
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Dr. Johnson said astronomers don’t know the mass of the M87 black hole they revealed last year to better than 10 percent accuracy, nor do they know if and how fast it is spinning
You can also see light from around the universe... (Score:2)
Re:You can also see light from around the universe (Score:5, Informative)
The original article does not dwell on or dramatize that issue.
https://advances.sciencemag.or... [sciencemag.org]
Recently an image was published of a black hole in M87, the first ever resolved image of a black hole. (I assume most people here on /. are familiar with that.) Of course, the black hole per se is not seen, just the halo of light around it. That original image shows the light as a blur or haze, like a camera lens out of focus. But, in theory, if that image could be further resolved, you would see complex structure within that halo. That structure represents patterns that rise from photons which are drawn to the vicinity of the black hole, make a swing around it, then escape. How many time a photon orbits the black hole before escaping will create some quantization effects, and as such, if the image was resolved enough, the image would appear to have rings or bands or arms or filaments.
The authors simply explain the physics behind this, doing the math, and then having a nice discussion about how that halo could be further resolved. This in turn would allow calculation of things like black hole mass and spin. Doing so requires wider base interferometry, so they further explain how much more information we would get if we had telescopes on the moon or earth-moon Lagrange points. It is a quite good paper.
The reason we can make the image is because those photons that took a swerve around the black whole came from every direction. They are neither better nor worse nor anything else. They just happened to have come from all angles, hence all over the universe, which means they will also be spun off at all angles. That rudimentary fact is presumed to be self evident. The physicists are smart. The dude who wrote the NYT article is not. Writing headlines like "Black Hole Photo May Also Have Captured Light From Around the Universe" is just sophomoric dramatization meant to sell the article, yet another example of how badly science and tech reporting have been dumbed down to crass sensationalism.
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That rudimentary fact is presumed to be self evident. The physicists are smart. The dude who wrote the NYT article is not. Writing headlines like "Black Hole Photo May Also Have Captured Light From Around the Universe" is just sophomoric dramatization meant to sell the article, yet another example of how badly science and tech reporting have been dumbed down to crass sensationalism.
... you say on Slashdot.
Complaining about the news on a cheap Internet meta-news chat site, there is no way to look intelligent doing that.
You may as well roll up to a "car show" in an Arby's parking lot and complain about all the Mustangs.
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Just don't get carried away. [s-nbcnews.com]
Hallelujah! (Score:1)
Finally my lost sock pairs are being located!
I totally predicted this with a thought experiment (Score:1)
... didn't have anything else to share. I just think it's cool that it turns out it actually works that way.
Surface of a black hole (Score:1)
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"This view also gives us a theory that we are all indeed only living in a simulation (or even a simulation within another simulation), but that's a different story for another day."
No, we aren't. That is simply a figment of the mathematics we use to describe physics.
Not just further into the past (Score:2)
This shows light of bodies we CAN see from a very distant and distinct coordinate, add in more than one such reference and you are talking about potentially very detailed multi-dimensional data we otherwise couldn't see without faster than light travel.
Huge baseline astrometry (Score:2)
In the future, with very high resolution radio or optical telescopes, if we could make out the fine details of the distorted scenery seen via a nearby black hole, we'd have a view of distant stars that isn't from Earth or only several AU out, but from a viewpoint of many light years away. Imagine using that data to triangulate positions of distant stars within out galaxy!
We'd also be seeing well-known stars at a different time, many thousands of years earlier than with Earth-based observations. That would