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OT - Long range photography..Black Hole BS?

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GregSY

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Today's big news was the first photo ever of a black hole.

Here's my opinion - it's most likely B.S. on the part of dreamers and scientists eager to have something exciting and important in their realm.

In the astronomy courses I took, the term 'theoretical astronomer' was a commonly used phrase. The professor, who was one, admitted that a great deal of their work was ... theoretical...and had never been proven. Black Holes were part of that.

A couple years ago I saw a breathtaking photo of some sort of event in outer space. Spectacular colors. Then, if you read further, there was a casual mention that the photo had been 'colorized' to enhance the effect of what we can't actually see. Huh?

So....do we REALLY have cameras that can photograph anything that far away? Or do we have a bunch of static and 'data' that has been massaged and interpreted by scientists to suit their need?
 
Yeh right. They made the whole thing up just for grins. Of COURSE it is computer manipulated. How else do you combine data from multiple sources and make a presentable image for humans. We do not see in the UV and IR ranges for a start.
 
do we REALLY have cameras that can photograph anything that far away? Or do we have a bunch of static and 'data' that has been massaged and interpreted by scientists to suit their need?
Yes, and yes, but take the sneer quotes off "data".

If you've read anything about this, you'll be aware that a bunch of radio telescopes all over the world have been collecting image data since 2017, with the data collection synchronized by atomic clocks so that data received by telescopes half-way around the world can be correlated. So, there was no film. Nor was there anything like a giant CMOS photo sensor. The collected data went "direct to digital". So there was not a camera in the sense of a Canon or Nikon, but there certainly was a "image forming system based on accumulated incident energy" which is exactly what a camera is. This particular camera happened to be a very long baseline interferometric system that time-shared a bunch of separately operated radio telescopes.

Because the collected signals are so weak, there was in fact a huge amount of static and noise. That's the primary reason this required years of data collection: to ensure that the persistent signal could be distinguished from the day-to-day noise. The signal comes in every day, but the noise is random (pretty much by definition).

If you read a little deeper, you'd see that the researchers applied a bunch of competing analysis techniques to dig the signal out of the noise. This is analogous to developing an image on film. And all the techniques came up with very similar image results. The headline "photo" image is actually a compromise among the various specific results.

While I'm sure the researchers are chuffed to have some actual science on the covers of various newspapers and magazines, the real scientific objective was to determine the shape of the central part of the image. It says something fundamental about gravity and relativity whether that part is circular, squished one way (prolate), or squished the other way (oblate). The extracted image is good enough to make that determination.
 
It is worthy to note it isn’t a “photograph” In the usual sense of the word, but a visual representation of microwave radio signals collected w/ “a”radio telescope nearly the size of the planet... actually simultaneous recordings from multiple receivers scattered all over the planet.
Still it’s an incredible visualization and confirmation of a astrophysics theory that arose out of general relativity.
 
Of course it is not an actual, unaltered, visible light photo. We don't have an optical telescope big enough to do that at that distance.

With an education in physics and a long time interest in astronomy, I find it a lot more believable than "climate change" and we can look at that up close and personal. If you were near enough to that object, it probably would not look like that image to the naked eye. But it does represent something that has a good probability of being a black hole. What you see in the image is not the actual black hole but rather the matter that surrounds it that is being pulled into it. A black hole, by definition, does not radiate anything. If you did look at one up close, it may be very disappointing.

And, yes, I have heard the theories that they can "leak". But, if that is correct, it is a slow process and you don't see anything that is actually in the black hole, only things that surround it, some of which have "come out of it". So, you don't actually see it, only it's effects on the surrounding space.
 
If you question if black holes exist, yes they do. In fact they were discovered because light that passed by them was bent due their enormous mass. Validation of Eisenstein's theories.

Tom
 
Of course it is a fake. A real black hole is so dense that no light escapes from it. The gravity is so strong the light is pulled into it. Since there is no light , or any other radiation, leaving it all you see is nothing. Kind of like a shadow. I think it relates to Plato? and people living a cave only seeing shadows of the outside world. Does the outside world rally exist or is it all smoke and mirrors.
Bil lD.
 
Here's a link to an article about how it was imaged with multiple radio telescopes (of course it was colourized, no one can see radio waves!!!). A key part of the mathematical algorithm used to combine the data from multiple telescopes was invented by Katie Bouman a Caltech computer science student at the time. Her contribution is at the bottom of the article linked below. They had two separate teams processing and stitching the data together to cross check the result: they arrived at the same answer. The larger the diameter of a radio telescope, the finer the detail it can resolve, these days they can mathematically combine several widely separated telescopes to simulate the resolution of a radio dish the diameter of the distance separating the two telescopes.

Katie Bouman.jpg

Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough | Science | The Guardian
 
It is worthy to note it isn’t a “photograph” In the usual sense of the word, but a visual representation of microwave radio signals collected w/ “a”radio telescope nearly the size of the planet... actually simultaneous recordings from multiple receivers scattered all over the planet.
Still it’s an incredible visualization and confirmation of a astrophysics theory that arose out of general relativity.

Below is my mistake...only three days data...5 petabytes.
This is correct.
How Did Astronomers Capture the First-Ever Close-Up of a Black Hole?


Point...the actual base line was the diameter of the earths orbit.
 
people... some have no problem imagining things and believing they are real without any actual proof one seeing the thing in real life or even "seeing" one using instruments, because it fits in "their reality" and also just happens to make their life easier, but will say it is BS when actual science is done and results are interpreted and presented in visual range of human eye calling it "manipulation" as in - being faked

here is a visual representation of a whole bunch of "data", just some letters and numbers really, looks quite real to me...
5-Axis_Parts_-_Masks_ggxa3r.jpg
 
people... some have no problem imagining things and believing they are real without any actual proof one seeing the thing in real life or even "seeing" one using instruments, because it fits in "their reality" and also just happens to make their life easier,

Yeah, what sold me off the religious idea is that any "new, fresh, Original" religion is just a cult! That said, ghosts are real and after seeing one im very very convinced of that fact. More than happy to belive in alien life too as the odds of us being alone seam slim these days + it would kinda suck if were the brightest life forms in a 13 billion light year radius!

As to black holes, i like em, i believe in em, would be a great solution to waste disposal if we could harness it. Some point we really have to invent a rocket drive technology more advanced than a stone age man taking a dump after too hot a curry so we can actually get our asses out this solar system and go understand this stuff. And i don't mean a more advanced fuel burning rocket! We fundamentally gotta move differently! Yeah i don't know how either!
 
It’s always best to go the the literature and read the research.
The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The only problem is the paywall.
That and the untidy fact that depending on your education level it might well sound like ‘gibberish’.
I think you are going to have to take their word on this one..

Astronomers capture first image of a black hole | NSF - National Science Foundation
 
I watched an interesting BBC documentary about it last night:-

BBC Four - How to See a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery

The science was beyond me, but it was fascinating to learn about the logistical aspects. I had trouble grasping the concept of timing to a millionth of a millionth of a second, but more at home with someone bending pieces of aluminium to put in the computers to improve cooling, the difficulty in thinking straight when working at high altitude, the fact that radio telescopes in the Antarctic or even on Hawaii volcanoes aren't as stable as you might wish....
 
So...manipulated data is "real" because it is performed by a bunch of people in a room (rooms) that all "believe" the same thing and are convinced of a particular outcome ahead of the actual outcome and discount any data that does not enhance the probability of that particular outcome - oh ... but that's not religious at all...
 
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Yeh right. They made the whole thing up just for grins. Of COURSE it is computer manipulated. How else do you combine data from multiple sources and make a presentable image for humans. We do not see in the UV and IR ranges for a start.

So this "so-called" black hole, is it a thing or not a thing?
 
It’s always best to go the the literature and read the research.
The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The only problem is the paywall.
That and the untidy fact that depending on your education level it might well sound like ‘gibberish’.
I think you are going to have to take their word on this one..

Astronomers capture first image of a black hole | NSF - National Science Foundation

And what you are suggesting is not an aspect of "faith".
 
people... some have no problem imagining things and believing they are real without any actual proof one seeing the thing in real life or even "seeing" one using instruments, because it fits in "their reality" and also just happens to make their life easier, but will say it is BS when actual science is done and results are interpreted and presented in visual range of human eye calling it "manipulation" as in - being faked

here is a visual representation of a whole bunch of "data", just some letters and numbers really, looks quite real to me...
View attachment 254217

And by "actual science" you mean what exactly? The manipulation part?
 
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