Please take...I owe you an avatar anyhow!
The dangers of opening your third eye...it might just keep opening...lol.
Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
Please take...I owe you an avatar anyhow!
The dangers of opening your third eye...it might just keep opening...lol.
- Sep 28, 2008
- 41,271
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- 4,281
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- 954 so/sx
IDK....she looks pretty content in the picture even with her body swirling away into lord knows where....lol
Here are a few poor quality pictures of the new bookshelves/library rolling ladder in it’s finished stage.
It’s 15 feet across so I had to put the crappy fish-eye on to get the whole thing in there, but you can also see how high it is...it was totally inaccessible before and a waste of space.
It turned out really fantastic and very, very stable (after I climbed in the fucking hot attic and stuck giant anchors through the wall, lol).
Engineering/ordering the railing and the mounting brackets was a bit difficult as well.
The easiest part I would say was actually putting up the railing once it came.
Building the shelves were not the easiest as they are actually IKEA shelves re-engineered to fit that space (which it does so nicely!) and those were the cheapest part at less than $150.
The railing was slightly right around $160-180 I think?
The ladder itself normally sells new for around $800...luckily there was someone 20 mins from us who was selling one for $88 they had bought for a tiny home project that they never used it for...other than some wear from it being stored outside...it’s in perfect working condition.
Overall...it was somewhere in the range of $300+ which sure isn’t bad considering that hiring someone to build such a thing for us would be thousands I’m sure.
I like that the shelves are unpainted wood and the ladder is grey metal, more industrial (it pulls out or it can lay flat against the wall which is nice).
Those french doors are also a project, there once was only a wall there...those came out of a house in Portland that was being gutted.
They will soon be painted a burgundy, and they lead into the music room with the piano and the harp.
( @Wyote )
(Again, apologies for the resolution)
It’s 15 feet across so I had to put the crappy fish-eye on to get the whole thing in there, but you can also see how high it is...it was totally inaccessible before and a waste of space.
It turned out really fantastic and very, very stable (after I climbed in the fucking hot attic and stuck giant anchors through the wall, lol).
Engineering/ordering the railing and the mounting brackets was a bit difficult as well.
The easiest part I would say was actually putting up the railing once it came.
Building the shelves were not the easiest as they are actually IKEA shelves re-engineered to fit that space (which it does so nicely!) and those were the cheapest part at less than $150.
The railing was slightly right around $160-180 I think?
The ladder itself normally sells new for around $800...luckily there was someone 20 mins from us who was selling one for $88 they had bought for a tiny home project that they never used it for...other than some wear from it being stored outside...it’s in perfect working condition.
Overall...it was somewhere in the range of $300+ which sure isn’t bad considering that hiring someone to build such a thing for us would be thousands I’m sure.
I like that the shelves are unpainted wood and the ladder is grey metal, more industrial (it pulls out or it can lay flat against the wall which is nice).
Those french doors are also a project, there once was only a wall there...those came out of a house in Portland that was being gutted.
They will soon be painted a burgundy, and they lead into the music room with the piano and the harp.
( @Wyote )
(Again, apologies for the resolution)
Last edited:
- Sep 28, 2008
- 41,271
- 246,904
- 4,281
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 954 so/sx
To follow up the previous article that hinted at this!
Enjoy!
Here is your official tag @Ginny !!
By Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach
April 10 at 10:10 AM
Scientists have finally captured the first image of a black hole, a bottomless pit in the fabric of the universe from which not even light can escape.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest things in the cosmos, until now hidden behind dust and gas and the blinding radiation from the matter caught in their gravitational grip and whirling violently around them.
The highly anticipated portrait, unveiled Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in news conferences in six other cities across the globe, shows an extraordinary, “supermassive” black hole at the center of Messier 87, a gigantic galaxy about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves.
It represents a technical triumph for the scientists involved, and inaugurates a new era in the study of black holes, galaxy formation, and the laws of physics under extreme conditions.
The M87 black hole appears as a dark shadow within a doughnut-like ring of hot, glowing material.
"You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam who spoke at the Washington news conference.
Within the shadow in the image is the black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return, where the gravity becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever leave.
At the center of the black hole, time and space become so curved upon themselves that the laws of physics break down completely.
The thrilling success of the observation was coupled with a twinge of disappointment, because the new image does not upend the scientific consensus about black holes.
The distinctive doughnut shape of the black hole matches what theorists had expected.
Significantly, the M87 black hole doesn’t show any sign of disobeying the physics equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Science is typically an incremental enterprise with relatively few drumroll-inciting press conferences.
But this was exactly that.
The mere announcement of the press conferences generated days of news stories.
Somehow, the historic first image of a black hole was kept under wraps for months by the Event Horizon Telescope team.
Like the Mueller Report, it never leaked.
At 9:07 a.m. EDT, Shep Doeleman, the Harvard astrophysicist who directed the project, took the podium at the press club in Washington and said, “Here it is.”
The simple, bold, orange-hued image flashed on the big screen behind him.
Simultaneously the image appeared on the project’s web site, and quickly went viral online, with the predictable parodies and expert commentary on how much it looked like the Eye of Sauron from “Lord of the Rings.”
Doeleman said after the news conference that about 400 people associated with the project had seen the image before Wednesday.
Everyone understood how important it was to keep it secret and remain united, he said.
“You have 400 people who are essentially spies. Will not break under any torture,” he said.
Markoff said she and other scientists got their first look at an early image of the M87 black hole last summer, and although it generally matched what the computer models had predicted a black hole would look like, she was still in awe.
“The impact of really seeing it for the first time, it was really surprising, kind of emotional,” she said. “I walked around with the image on my cellphone and I kept pulling it out and looking at it at random moments. And I couldn’t tell anybody."
Another team member, theoretical astrophysicist Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute, said he kept giving lectures on black holes but was forced to keep the image secret while his colleagues refined the data and wrote the papers about what the image signified.
“Hardest thing ever,” he said. “You can tell no one.”
The news conference Wednesday, he said, “is an enormous psychological relief to me.”
The image had its origins over the course of a week in April 2017, when EHT astronomers on four continents coordinated their efforts.
Black holes, characterized by their extreme density, are tiny compared to other astronomical objects.
Even supermassive black holes have an almost imperceptibly small profile.
The scientists decided they had two plausible targets.
One is the black hole known as Sagittarius A*, at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, which has a mass equivalent to more than 4 million suns and resides some 25,000 light years away.
The other is the black hole in M87.
It’s much farther away, but also much larger, with a mass of 6.5 billion suns.
To perform the observation, the astronomers battled bad weather and glitchy electric grids.
They donned oxygen tanks and climbed three-mile-high mountains to escape the interference of Earth’s atmosphere.
Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT.
Finally, they tested their findings against the results of a million simulations of what a black hole might look like, until at last they spotted a match.
Feryal Ozel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and member of the science council for the EHT, called the result the highlight of her career.
“We are able to image one more object in the universe that … at one point people thought could not be possible,” she said. “It hits that human explorer spirit. We got another look into the unknown.”
The foundations for this discovery were laid more than 100 years ago, when Einstein published the equations that defined modern gravitational physics. General relativity, first described in 1915, explained gravity as a phenomenon created when matter warps the geometry of space and time.
In turn, curved space and time (“space-time”) tells matter how to move.
Months after Einstein produced the equations for general relativity, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated that if an object is dense enough, it would create what we now call a black hole.
Einstein never liked the idea, but it hung around, and gradually scientists started seeing evidence that black holes really exist.
Searches of the sky showed the paths of stars being bent by a black hole’s tremendous gravity, and telescopes revealed the brilliant jets of light produced as the superheated material swirling around a black hole is splashed back into space.
In 2016, scientists revealed ripples in space-time caused by black holes colliding — the first-ever detection of the phenomenon known as gravitational waves.
To capture a direct image of a supermassive black hole was a daunting technological challenge.
M87 and Sagittarius A* are both so distant they would appear to Earthlings as a doughnut on the moon.
To see them in any kind of detail, scientists would need a telescope as big as the planet — and, of course, no such thing existed.
So in the mid-2000s, scientists began to MacGyver a telescope out of previously existing infrastructure, linking up instruments around the world to collect scores of observations, each from a slightly different perspective.
This kind of cosmic triangulation, called “very long baseline interferometry,” took years to refine.
Some telescopes had to be upgraded to capture the right kinds of light.
Researchers needed to install atomic clocks precise enough to match up their observations down to the microsecond.
Supercomputers had to become orders of magnitude more powerful to process the mountains of data collected.
Most significant was an improvement in VLBI technology that allowed for observations in extremely high-frequency radio waves.
This is the one form of light that can penetrate the hot gas around a black hole, the dusty expanses of the galaxy, and the Earth’s atmosphere, carrying an uninterrupted signal from the event horizon all the way to telescopes on Earth.
“We were inventing the methods by which we make images as we went along,” said team member Dan Marrone, an astrophysicist a the University of Arizona.
Finally, in 2017, the EHT was ready.
Ozel, who helped coordinate the week of observations from the project’s makeshift command center at MIT, recalled the surge of excitement as hundreds of astronomers around the world prepared for their first night of work.
“There was an element of the unknown,” she said.
Technical difficulties or bad weather at any of the eight sites could jettison a whole night of observations.
Even if everything went to plan, the astronomers would be working 16 hours a night gathering data.
And it would be months before anyone knew whether their work had paid off.
To Marrone, who coordinated observations in Arizona and at the South Pole from his office at the University of Arizona, “exhausting doesn’t begin to describe it.”
He guessed that he slept for only three hours out of every 24.
After five nights of observing (with one rest day while heavy winds rocked the project’s Mexico telescope), the project had collected 5 billion megabytes of data — the equivalent of 960 hard drives containing 2 billion high-quality photographs.
Somewhere in that vast collection was the image of a black hole.
Now the scientists had to find it.
Geoffrey Crew, an astronomer at MIT who helped coordinate the data processing, compared the effort to discerning a concerto played at a piano that is missing several keys.
“If you only have a couple of notes, you don’t know what you’re listening to,” he said. “It’s trying to reconstruct the missing data based on what we know about how music works to create the song.”
Four subgroups at four laboratories around the globe were assigned to develop the image using four algorithms; none was allowed to know what the others were doing, as a form of quality control.
“If the scientific goal wasn’t so attractive and so full of potential, and if we hadn’t spent so much time working toward this goal, I think it probably would have fallen apart,” Ozel said. “The science kept us together.”
Their work isn’t done: Doeleman, the director of the project, said his team is still analyzing the data from observations of Sagittarius A*, which he described as a dynamic and exciting black hole compared to the more stately M87 black hole.
It may be possible to capture short-term changes in Sagittarius A*, he said.
“Imagine if we can make a movie of a black hole instead of a still image,” he said.
Enjoy!
Here is your official tag @Ginny !!
See a black hole for the first time in a
historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope
historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope
By Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach
April 10 at 10:10 AM
Scientists have finally captured the first image of a black hole, a bottomless pit in the fabric of the universe from which not even light can escape.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest things in the cosmos, until now hidden behind dust and gas and the blinding radiation from the matter caught in their gravitational grip and whirling violently around them.
The highly anticipated portrait, unveiled Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in news conferences in six other cities across the globe, shows an extraordinary, “supermassive” black hole at the center of Messier 87, a gigantic galaxy about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves.
It represents a technical triumph for the scientists involved, and inaugurates a new era in the study of black holes, galaxy formation, and the laws of physics under extreme conditions.
The M87 black hole appears as a dark shadow within a doughnut-like ring of hot, glowing material.
"You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam who spoke at the Washington news conference.
Within the shadow in the image is the black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return, where the gravity becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever leave.
At the center of the black hole, time and space become so curved upon themselves that the laws of physics break down completely.
The thrilling success of the observation was coupled with a twinge of disappointment, because the new image does not upend the scientific consensus about black holes.
The distinctive doughnut shape of the black hole matches what theorists had expected.
Significantly, the M87 black hole doesn’t show any sign of disobeying the physics equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Science is typically an incremental enterprise with relatively few drumroll-inciting press conferences.
But this was exactly that.
The mere announcement of the press conferences generated days of news stories.
Somehow, the historic first image of a black hole was kept under wraps for months by the Event Horizon Telescope team.
Like the Mueller Report, it never leaked.
At 9:07 a.m. EDT, Shep Doeleman, the Harvard astrophysicist who directed the project, took the podium at the press club in Washington and said, “Here it is.”
The simple, bold, orange-hued image flashed on the big screen behind him.
Simultaneously the image appeared on the project’s web site, and quickly went viral online, with the predictable parodies and expert commentary on how much it looked like the Eye of Sauron from “Lord of the Rings.”
Doeleman said after the news conference that about 400 people associated with the project had seen the image before Wednesday.
Everyone understood how important it was to keep it secret and remain united, he said.
“You have 400 people who are essentially spies. Will not break under any torture,” he said.
Markoff said she and other scientists got their first look at an early image of the M87 black hole last summer, and although it generally matched what the computer models had predicted a black hole would look like, she was still in awe.
“The impact of really seeing it for the first time, it was really surprising, kind of emotional,” she said. “I walked around with the image on my cellphone and I kept pulling it out and looking at it at random moments. And I couldn’t tell anybody."
Another team member, theoretical astrophysicist Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute, said he kept giving lectures on black holes but was forced to keep the image secret while his colleagues refined the data and wrote the papers about what the image signified.
“Hardest thing ever,” he said. “You can tell no one.”
The news conference Wednesday, he said, “is an enormous psychological relief to me.”
The image had its origins over the course of a week in April 2017, when EHT astronomers on four continents coordinated their efforts.
Black holes, characterized by their extreme density, are tiny compared to other astronomical objects.
Even supermassive black holes have an almost imperceptibly small profile.
The scientists decided they had two plausible targets.
One is the black hole known as Sagittarius A*, at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, which has a mass equivalent to more than 4 million suns and resides some 25,000 light years away.
The other is the black hole in M87.
It’s much farther away, but also much larger, with a mass of 6.5 billion suns.
To perform the observation, the astronomers battled bad weather and glitchy electric grids.
They donned oxygen tanks and climbed three-mile-high mountains to escape the interference of Earth’s atmosphere.
Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT.
Finally, they tested their findings against the results of a million simulations of what a black hole might look like, until at last they spotted a match.
Feryal Ozel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and member of the science council for the EHT, called the result the highlight of her career.
“We are able to image one more object in the universe that … at one point people thought could not be possible,” she said. “It hits that human explorer spirit. We got another look into the unknown.”
[Algorithms gave us the black hole picture. She's the 29-year-old scientist who helped create them.]
The foundations for this discovery were laid more than 100 years ago, when Einstein published the equations that defined modern gravitational physics. General relativity, first described in 1915, explained gravity as a phenomenon created when matter warps the geometry of space and time.
In turn, curved space and time (“space-time”) tells matter how to move.
Months after Einstein produced the equations for general relativity, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated that if an object is dense enough, it would create what we now call a black hole.
Einstein never liked the idea, but it hung around, and gradually scientists started seeing evidence that black holes really exist.
Searches of the sky showed the paths of stars being bent by a black hole’s tremendous gravity, and telescopes revealed the brilliant jets of light produced as the superheated material swirling around a black hole is splashed back into space.
In 2016, scientists revealed ripples in space-time caused by black holes colliding — the first-ever detection of the phenomenon known as gravitational waves.
To capture a direct image of a supermassive black hole was a daunting technological challenge.
M87 and Sagittarius A* are both so distant they would appear to Earthlings as a doughnut on the moon.
To see them in any kind of detail, scientists would need a telescope as big as the planet — and, of course, no such thing existed.
So in the mid-2000s, scientists began to MacGyver a telescope out of previously existing infrastructure, linking up instruments around the world to collect scores of observations, each from a slightly different perspective.
This kind of cosmic triangulation, called “very long baseline interferometry,” took years to refine.
Some telescopes had to be upgraded to capture the right kinds of light.
Researchers needed to install atomic clocks precise enough to match up their observations down to the microsecond.
Supercomputers had to become orders of magnitude more powerful to process the mountains of data collected.
Most significant was an improvement in VLBI technology that allowed for observations in extremely high-frequency radio waves.
This is the one form of light that can penetrate the hot gas around a black hole, the dusty expanses of the galaxy, and the Earth’s atmosphere, carrying an uninterrupted signal from the event horizon all the way to telescopes on Earth.
“We were inventing the methods by which we make images as we went along,” said team member Dan Marrone, an astrophysicist a the University of Arizona.
Finally, in 2017, the EHT was ready.
Ozel, who helped coordinate the week of observations from the project’s makeshift command center at MIT, recalled the surge of excitement as hundreds of astronomers around the world prepared for their first night of work.
“There was an element of the unknown,” she said.
Technical difficulties or bad weather at any of the eight sites could jettison a whole night of observations.
Even if everything went to plan, the astronomers would be working 16 hours a night gathering data.
And it would be months before anyone knew whether their work had paid off.
To Marrone, who coordinated observations in Arizona and at the South Pole from his office at the University of Arizona, “exhausting doesn’t begin to describe it.”
He guessed that he slept for only three hours out of every 24.
After five nights of observing (with one rest day while heavy winds rocked the project’s Mexico telescope), the project had collected 5 billion megabytes of data — the equivalent of 960 hard drives containing 2 billion high-quality photographs.
Somewhere in that vast collection was the image of a black hole.
Now the scientists had to find it.
Geoffrey Crew, an astronomer at MIT who helped coordinate the data processing, compared the effort to discerning a concerto played at a piano that is missing several keys.
“If you only have a couple of notes, you don’t know what you’re listening to,” he said. “It’s trying to reconstruct the missing data based on what we know about how music works to create the song.”
Four subgroups at four laboratories around the globe were assigned to develop the image using four algorithms; none was allowed to know what the others were doing, as a form of quality control.
“If the scientific goal wasn’t so attractive and so full of potential, and if we hadn’t spent so much time working toward this goal, I think it probably would have fallen apart,” Ozel said. “The science kept us together.”
Their work isn’t done: Doeleman, the director of the project, said his team is still analyzing the data from observations of Sagittarius A*, which he described as a dynamic and exciting black hole compared to the more stately M87 black hole.
It may be possible to capture short-term changes in Sagittarius A*, he said.
“Imagine if we can make a movie of a black hole instead of a still image,” he said.
Full story with several videos - https://www.washingtonpost.com/scie...lQJndBAGc2d-w2-z_DWYhU&utm_term=.723fa0bf4d4c
Last edited:
Here are a few poor quality pictures of the new bookshelves/library rolling ladder in it’s finished stage.
It’s 15 feet across so I had to put the crappy fish-eye on to get the whole thing in there, but you can also see how high it is...it was totally inaccessible before and a waste of space.
It turned out really fantastic and very, very stable (after I climbed in the fucking hot attic and stuck giant anchors through the wall, lol).
Engineering/ordering the railing and the mounting brackets was a bit difficult as well.
The easiest part I would say was actually putting up the railing once it came.
Building the shelves were not the easiest as they are actually IKEA shelves re-engineered to fit that space (which it does so nicely!) and those were the cheapest part at less than $150.
The railing was slightly right around $160-180 I think?
The ladder itself normally sells new for around $800...luckily there was someone 20 mins from us who was selling one for $88 they had bought for a tiny home project that they never used it for...other than some wear from it being stored outside...it’s in perfect working condition.
I like that the shelves are unpainted wood and the ladder is grey metal, more industrial (it pulls out or it can lay flat against the wall which is nice).
Those french doors are also a project, there once was only a wall there...those came out of a house in Portland that was being gutted.
They will soon be painted a burgundy, and they lead into the music room with the piano and the harp.
( @Wyote )
View attachment 50236
View attachment 50237
View attachment 50238
View attachment 50239
(Again, apologies for the resolution)
Wow it looks amazing so far Skare!
It’s looking so nice! Do tag me the end result of the library! To follow up the previous article that hinted at this!
Enjoy!
Here is your official tag @Ginny !!
See a black hole for the first time in a
historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope
By Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach
April 10 at 10:10 AM
Scientists have finally captured the first image of a black hole, a bottomless pit in the fabric of the universe from which not even light can escape.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest things in the cosmos, until now hidden behind dust and gas and the blinding radiation from the matter caught in their gravitational grip and whirling violently around them.
The highly anticipated portrait, unveiled Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in news conferences in six other cities across the globe, shows an extraordinary, “supermassive” black hole at the center of Messier 87, a gigantic galaxy about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves.
It represents a technical triumph for the scientists involved, and inaugurates a new era in the study of black holes, galaxy formation, and the laws of physics under extreme conditions.
The M87 black hole appears as a dark shadow within a doughnut-like ring of hot, glowing material.
"You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam who spoke at the Washington news conference.
Within the shadow in the image is the black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return, where the gravity becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever leave.
At the center of the black hole, time and space become so curved upon themselves that the laws of physics break down completely.
The thrilling success of the observation was coupled with a twinge of disappointment, because the new image does not upend the scientific consensus about black holes.
The distinctive doughnut shape of the black hole matches what theorists had expected.
Significantly, the M87 black hole doesn’t show any sign of disobeying the physics equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Science is typically an incremental enterprise with relatively few drumroll-inciting press conferences.
But this was exactly that.
The mere announcement of the press conferences generated days of news stories.
Somehow, the historic first image of a black hole was kept under wraps for months by the Event Horizon Telescope team.
Like the Mueller Report, it never leaked.
At 9:07 a.m. EDT, Shep Doeleman, the Harvard astrophysicist who directed the project, took the podium at the press club in Washington and said, “Here it is.”
The simple, bold, orange-hued image flashed on the big screen behind him.
Simultaneously the image appeared on the project’s web site, and quickly went viral online, with the predictable parodies and expert commentary on how much it looked like the Eye of Sauron from “Lord of the Rings.”
Doeleman said after the news conference that about 400 people associated with the project had seen the image before Wednesday.
Everyone understood how important it was to keep it secret and remain united, he said.
“You have 400 people who are essentially spies. Will not break under any torture,” he said.
Markoff said she and other scientists got their first look at an early image of the M87 black hole last summer, and although it generally matched what the computer models had predicted a black hole would look like, she was still in awe.
“The impact of really seeing it for the first time, it was really surprising, kind of emotional,” she said. “I walked around with the image on my cellphone and I kept pulling it out and looking at it at random moments. And I couldn’t tell anybody."
Another team member, theoretical astrophysicist Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute, said he kept giving lectures on black holes but was forced to keep the image secret while his colleagues refined the data and wrote the papers about what the image signified.
“Hardest thing ever,” he said. “You can tell no one.”
The news conference Wednesday, he said, “is an enormous psychological relief to me.”
The image had its origins over the course of a week in April 2017, when EHT astronomers on four continents coordinated their efforts.
Black holes, characterized by their extreme density, are tiny compared to other astronomical objects.
Even supermassive black holes have an almost imperceptibly small profile.
The scientists decided they had two plausible targets.
One is the black hole known as Sagittarius A*, at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, which has a mass equivalent to more than 4 million suns and resides some 25,000 light years away.
The other is the black hole in M87.
It’s much farther away, but also much larger, with a mass of 6.5 billion suns.
To perform the observation, the astronomers battled bad weather and glitchy electric grids.
They donned oxygen tanks and climbed three-mile-high mountains to escape the interference of Earth’s atmosphere.
Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT.
Finally, they tested their findings against the results of a million simulations of what a black hole might look like, until at last they spotted a match.
Feryal Ozel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and member of the science council for the EHT, called the result the highlight of her career.
“We are able to image one more object in the universe that … at one point people thought could not be possible,” she said. “It hits that human explorer spirit. We got another look into the unknown.”
[Algorithms gave us the black hole picture. She's the 29-year-old scientist who helped create them.]
The foundations for this discovery were laid more than 100 years ago, when Einstein published the equations that defined modern gravitational physics. General relativity, first described in 1915, explained gravity as a phenomenon created when matter warps the geometry of space and time.
In turn, curved space and time (“space-time”) tells matter how to move.
Months after Einstein produced the equations for general relativity, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated that if an object is dense enough, it would create what we now call a black hole.
Einstein never liked the idea, but it hung around, and gradually scientists started seeing evidence that black holes really exist.
Searches of the sky showed the paths of stars being bent by a black hole’s tremendous gravity, and telescopes revealed the brilliant jets of light produced as the superheated material swirling around a black hole is splashed back into space.
In 2016, scientists revealed ripples in space-time caused by black holes colliding — the first-ever detection of the phenomenon known as gravitational waves.
To capture a direct image of a supermassive black hole was a daunting technological challenge.
M87 and Sagittarius A* are both so distant they would appear to Earthlings as a doughnut on the moon.
To see them in any kind of detail, scientists would need a telescope as big as the planet — and, of course, no such thing existed.
So in the mid-2000s, scientists began to MacGyver a telescope out of previously existing infrastructure, linking up instruments around the world to collect scores of observations, each from a slightly different perspective.
This kind of cosmic triangulation, called “very long baseline interferometry,” took years to refine.
Some telescopes had to be upgraded to capture the right kinds of light.
Researchers needed to install atomic clocks precise enough to match up their observations down to the microsecond.
Supercomputers had to become orders of magnitude more powerful to process the mountains of data collected.
Most significant was an improvement in VLBI technology that allowed for observations in extremely high-frequency radio waves.
This is the one form of light that can penetrate the hot gas around a black hole, the dusty expanses of the galaxy, and the Earth’s atmosphere, carrying an uninterrupted signal from the event horizon all the way to telescopes on Earth.
“We were inventing the methods by which we make images as we went along,” said team member Dan Marrone, an astrophysicist a the University of Arizona.
Finally, in 2017, the EHT was ready.
Ozel, who helped coordinate the week of observations from the project’s makeshift command center at MIT, recalled the surge of excitement as hundreds of astronomers around the world prepared for their first night of work.
“There was an element of the unknown,” she said.
Technical difficulties or bad weather at any of the eight sites could jettison a whole night of observations.
Even if everything went to plan, the astronomers would be working 16 hours a night gathering data.
And it would be months before anyone knew whether their work had paid off.
To Marrone, who coordinated observations in Arizona and at the South Pole from his office at the University of Arizona, “exhausting doesn’t begin to describe it.”
He guessed that he slept for only three hours out of every 24.
After five nights of observing (with one rest day while heavy winds rocked the project’s Mexico telescope), the project had collected 5 billion megabytes of data — the equivalent of 960 hard drives containing 2 billion high-quality photographs.
Somewhere in that vast collection was the image of a black hole.
Now the scientists had to find it.
Geoffrey Crew, an astronomer at MIT who helped coordinate the data processing, compared the effort to discerning a concerto played at a piano that is missing several keys.
“If you only have a couple of notes, you don’t know what you’re listening to,” he said. “It’s trying to reconstruct the missing data based on what we know about how music works to create the song.”
Four subgroups at four laboratories around the globe were assigned to develop the image using four algorithms; none was allowed to know what the others were doing, as a form of quality control.
“If the scientific goal wasn’t so attractive and so full of potential, and if we hadn’t spent so much time working toward this goal, I think it probably would have fallen apart,” Ozel said. “The science kept us together.”
Their work isn’t done: Doeleman, the director of the project, said his team is still analyzing the data from observations of Sagittarius A*, which he described as a dynamic and exciting black hole compared to the more stately M87 black hole.
It may be possible to capture short-term changes in Sagittarius A*, he said.
“Imagine if we can make a movie of a black hole instead of a still image,” he said.
Full story with several videos - https://www.washingtonpost.com/scie...lQJndBAGc2d-w2-z_DWYhU&utm_term=.723fa0bf4d4c
It’s amazing knowing that we finally got an actual image of a black hole, especially one like this. I think they depicted it perfectly that it looks like the Eye of Sauron from LOTR, it’s pretty incredible. I wouldn’t doubt in my mind we will find more wonderful discoveries in our lifetimes.
Wow it looks amazing so far Skare!
It’s amazing knowing that we finally got an actual image of a black hole, especially one like this. I think they depicted it perfectly that it looks like the Eye of Sauron from LOTR, it’s pretty incredible. I wouldn’t doubt in my mind we will find more wonderful discoveries in our lifetimes.
Well...it’s mostly just the transfer of books up there that remains to be done, lol.
The rest is finished (except for painting the doors)!
The black hole picture is crazy, I think it’s pretty cool...here are some artist representations...
Just plain amazing! I can't wait for more high resolution images coming up in the future and whatever more we can learn about the event horizon itself!
I can't wait for more high resolution images coming up in the future and whatever more we can learn about the event horizon itself!
Looks great Skare I hope you didn't put your back out doing this. It looks like quite a project.Here are a few poor quality pictures of the new bookshelves/library rolling ladder in it’s finished stage.
It’s 15 feet across so I had to put the crappy fish-eye on to get the whole thing in there, but you can also see how high it is...it was totally inaccessible before and a waste of space.
It turned out really fantastic and very, very stable (after I climbed in the fucking hot attic and stuck giant anchors through the wall, lol).
Engineering/ordering the railing and the mounting brackets was a bit difficult as well.
The easiest part I would say was actually putting up the railing once it came.
Building the shelves were not the easiest as they are actually IKEA shelves re-engineered to fit that space (which it does so nicely!) and those were the cheapest part at less than $150.
The railing was slightly right around $160-180 I think?
The ladder itself normally sells new for around $800...luckily there was someone 20 mins from us who was selling one for $88 they had bought for a tiny home project that they never used it for...other than some wear from it being stored outside...it’s in perfect working condition.
Overall...it was somewhere in the range of $300+ which sure isn’t bad considering that hiring someone to build such a thing for us would be thousands I’m sure.
I like that the shelves are unpainted wood and the ladder is grey metal, more industrial (it pulls out or it can lay flat against the wall which is nice).
Those french doors are also a project, there once was only a wall there...those came out of a house in Portland that was being gutted.
They will soon be painted a burgundy, and they lead into the music room with the piano and the harp.
( @Wyote )
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I might feel just a little apprehensive about a medic with a Dracula manual in the middle of the anatomy and surgery text books
Thanks John!Looks great Skare I hope you didn't put your back out doing this. It looks like quite a project.
I might feel just a little apprehensive about a medic with a Dracula manual in the middle of the anatomy and surgery text books
Nah...maybe a bit...
It takes a bit of extra planning to not overdo stuff like this...which in the long run actually is beneficial in many ways...for instance the placement of the brackets could not be within so many inches of the rail connectors, so a looooong time was spent engineering where everything was going to go and measured 5 or 6 times before committing...so when it came time to put it up...it went very smoothly and I only over exerted myself in the attic...that’s because I have a non-breathable zip-up suit with respirator for the insulation particulates and whatnot...so once you start to sweat (cause the attic gets warm) it’s all over...lolol.
I probably had more heat exhaustion than anything.
To be fair...”Dracula" is a classic and is situated next to Thoreau, “Walden”...yes, there are a few demonology books and similar - these are my books we are talking about after all, hahahaha.
There are a few titles there you can’t read that are far worse than “Dracula”!
As for Mosby’s “Care of the Patient in Surgery” - if I ever decide to become a mob surgeon in my garage it has good step by step instructions on most major surgeries lol (not that I need help with most
lol)...that and I paid far too much for that textbook...that thing is worth more than it's weight in gold probably, lol.Thanks for all the likes and I hope you are well?
Much love!
Thank you BritNi!
And thank you for all the “likes" and kind words/comments as well!
It is very nice to have a proper place for them that is also attractive and yet keeps them out of the way...which is twice as good for several older, out of print, difficult to find, or signed by the author books that are up there now!
Still figuring out now what to do with the record collection...lol.
Take care and much peace in your life!
I often feel like we have pretty similar meme humour Skare
I'm pretty sure Merkabah is the thread that inspired this meme:
I think we probably do too Ren!
lol
Wow!
That is super-flattering to infer that such a meme sprang forth from the loins of/or embodies this thread - thank you kind Sir!
Loving your own videos still...you have quite a following now it seems, how wonderful!
How about some live streams?
Thank you also for the giant slew of “likes” you have sent...my God man!
Much love to you and yours.
Here are a few poor quality pictures of the new bookshelves/library rolling ladder in it’s finished stage.
It’s 15 feet across so I had to put the crappy fish-eye on to get the whole thing in there, but you can also see how high it is...it was totally inaccessible before and a waste of space.
It turned out really fantastic and very, very stable (after I climbed in the fucking hot attic and stuck giant anchors through the wall, lol).
Engineering/ordering the railing and the mounting brackets was a bit difficult as well.
The easiest part I would say was actually putting up the railing once it came.
Building the shelves were not the easiest as they are actually IKEA shelves re-engineered to fit that space (which it does so nicely!) and those were the cheapest part at less than $150.
The railing was slightly right around $160-180 I think?
The ladder itself normally sells new for around $800...luckily there was someone 20 mins from us who was selling one for $88 they had bought for a tiny home project that they never used it for...other than some wear from it being stored outside...it’s in perfect working condition.
Overall...it was somewhere in the range of $300+ which sure isn’t bad considering that hiring someone to build such a thing for us would be thousands I’m sure.
I like that the shelves are unpainted wood and the ladder is grey metal, more industrial (it pulls out or it can lay flat against the wall which is nice).
Those french doors are also a project, there once was only a wall there...those came out of a house in Portland that was being gutted.
They will soon be painted a burgundy, and they lead into the music room with the piano and the harp.
( @Wyote )
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(Again, apologies for the resolution)
I'm inviting myself over. I always wanted to do the book ladder thing from Beauty and the Beast.
But seriously, that is an impressive DIY. You're a thinker and a handyman. Do you bake too?
I'm inviting myself over. I always wanted to do the book ladder thing from Beauty and the Beast.
But seriously, that is an impressive DIY. You're a thinker and a handyman. Do you bake too?
Haha...you’re welcome to visit!
If I had my way it would be even bigger...but for the space it fits really nice.
It was not a solo effort though I admit, and it is pretty hilarious getting two INFJs in a room trying to do their own version of “math”.
And yes...I went to chef school for a year after HS but decided it would take all the enjoyment away from it if I turned it into a career.
So somehow I ended up in the medical stuff, lol.
Thank you very much and much peace in your heart!
Many thanks for posting this article which has great depth of exploration in it. The 6th part is one that has intrigued me for many years now. We take our existence for granted don’t we? - after all, despite the contingency that determines our particular place in the world, it all seems pretty ordinary. But if you could stand at the beginning just before the Big Bang and ask what is the probability I will ever exist the answer is hardly different from absolutely no chance whatsoever. The figure given in the article is possibly even optimistic. It’s so low that many other explanations than pure blind chance are at least equally likely, if not more likely. In my view it seems far more reasonable to assume that there is something purposive and selective in who gets to exist than that each of us just came into the world by pure random luck.
I am sitting on a plane right now surrounded by strangers.
I can see the curvature of the earth and the setting sun.
It’s beautiful.
But not beautiful enough to displace my fear.
I am expecting my plane to explode any second.
It could happen.
It really could happen.
And it’s out of my control.
I vividly imagine my last moment.
Strange sound.
Confused faces.
The mass realization that something is irreparably wrong.
The acknowledgment that these strangers are now companions on the dark goodnight.
I feel my reluctant acceptance that this the end.
The final putting down of everything I carry in my heart.
My loudest goodbye.
But unheard by those who count.
I imagine my last breath.
How different that breath would be compared to the millions before it.
I see the pain on my girlfriend’s face, who I left a few hours ago.
I made sure to text her “I love you forever” before I boarded.
The word “forever” wasn’t me just being cliche.
I never said that to her before.
It was me speaking to her from eternity… just in case.
I once read that some people scratch the floor when they hear someone they love has died.
They want to escape the world, so they try to dig themselves out.
I hope people who love me don’t experience this.
I hope they can be happy and keep living for me, even if it’s difficult.
I would want that.
Sure, I know rationally that there are about 10,000 planes in the sky this very second.
I know rationally that plane crashes are ridiculously rare.
But I’m still afraid.
I have death anxiety.
You see, death has been on my mind lately.
In the last twelve months, I’ve seen a lot of people die.
One of my neighbors died of a brain tumor.
Another neighbor was diagnosed with liver cancer and died a week later.
My uncle had a sudden heart attack from a blot clot in his leg a month after retiring abroad.
An online friend Justin Alexander went missing in the Indian Mountains and is now presumed dead.
And my father was diagnosed with bowel cancer but luckily had it cleared through surgery.
I didn’t know how to process all of this when it happened.
I ended up developing a kind of hypochondria.
Getting all worked up over a niggle in my side.
Trips to the emergency department.
Death is such a strange thing.
One minute someone is there.
Then they aren’t.
We are all so fragile.
A fall, a crash, a bang, a twist, a sickness, a small mistake and that can be the end of you.
Your entire uniqueness thrown ceaselessly into oblivion.
It doesn’t matter if you are a world champion fighter.
It doesn’t matter if you are rich or famous.
Napoleon said, “All men are equal before the cannon,” and the same is true of death.
Mozart. Michelangelo. Marilyn Monroe.
They all experienced their last glimmer of consciousness.
And in that moment their earthly greatness was arbitrary.
All this death anxiety got me asking questions.
“What’s it all for?”
You know, why bother so much?
I used to think that people who didn’t strive for big things were wasting their lives.
Here I am reading lots of books, trying to “improve myself,” travel the world, live a “great life,” but why?
Leonardo da Vinci famously said, “I thought I was learning how to live, but I have really been learning how to die.”
What does that even mean?
With all these questions and all this angst I did what I normally do when I have a problem… I asked some very simple questions:
How can life be meaningful in the light of death?
And is death something that should be scary?
Fortunately, my plane landed safely.
But I didn’t feel safe. I still felt vulnerable.
And so I began my search for answers.
Below are the fruits of my journey into death.
6 Reasons Why Having Death Anxiety is Dumb
Intuitively it just makes sense that we wouldn’t want to die.
If this was something we wanted then that desire would really get in the way of life.
But there are many things I don’t want.
I don’t want to pay rent.
I don’t want to pay my phone bill.
I don’t want to floss my teeth later.
And that brings us to the first point.
Just because we don’t want something, that doesn’t mean we automatically need fear it.
Perhaps we fear death more than flossing our teeth because death seems to harm us and is associated with pain.
Pain in the absence of pleasure is intrinsically and undisputedly undesirable.
But this doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Most of us would choose to endure some intense pain for a few hours to live a long life than to die now painlessly.
So death harms us in some other way beyond “just pain.”
Or does it?
Most of us would assume that death is terrible.
The worst part of existence.
But upon further inspection, when we start to unpick what death actually is, we may realize that it’s not such a scary thing after all.
Maybe we don’t need to think of the grim reaper as a monster who tries to sap our life of all significance.
Maybe with the following 6 perspectives we can befriend him.
1) We never actually die
The infinitely wise Stoic philosopher Epicurus said:
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.
It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
Death isn’t really harmful to us because we never really die.
The thing you call “I” can never experience death.
“You” can never die.
You will never know death.
The experience of non-experience—of death—is inaccessible to you in every way.
If you’ve ever had an operation or a deep sleep or been knocked out, what did it feel like?
The answer is “absolutely nothing.”
It was neither good or bad.
The truth is, we experience mini deaths throughout our entire lives.
Non-experience is not a new experience.
2) We’ve already been there
Lucretius, the Roman poet who brought Epicurus’s ideas to his later audience, articulates what’s called the “symmetry argument.”
We have already experienced billions of years of non-existence before we were born, but we didn’t feel that bad about it.
We have already been there and it was fine, so why worry about returning there?
It wasn’t all that bad before you were born.
It was kind of peaceful in a bizarre way.
As you may have noticed, this is a therapeutic idea, but the argument isn’t completely airtight.
Why?
We don’t think of the past the same way as we think of the future.
Death deprives us of seeing through our future goals.
This is probably the most unfortunate aspect of dying.
It’s a horrible thought knowing that our ambitions will suddenly be cut short.
Death does deprive us of our future, and this proves that death is something not to be desired.
But does it mean that death should be feared at all costs?
Should we be walking around consumed by death anxiety?
Is death the ultimate harm that can be done to us?
Not quite.
3) The alternative to death is even worse
Immortality sounds so cool.
You get to experience so much — an infinite amount.
You would have endless time to pursue every interest, master all skills, read every book, possess everything you desire, and fall in love over and over and over with every type of person.
Every kind of goal you have right now would eventually be fulfilled if you lived for eternity.
But how long would it take before life becomes sapped of its urgency?
How long would it take before the new hobby you’ve undertaken becomes dull again?
How mystical would your love life be knowing that if it doesn’t work out, you have infinite time to do it again?
How exciting would fame be after 5,000 years of being followed around by the paparazzi?
You would be on the constant search for novelty, and novelty would become more scarce with each passing year.
Eventually it would be difficult to muster the motivation to get out of bed.
The only thing you would desire would be the ability to desire.
In short, it is likely you would be depressed.
Francois La Rochefoucauld wrote “Supreme cleverness is knowledge of the real value of things.”
The fact that we know we will one day die, that we have limited time to pursue our goals, tells us what we should value like nothing else.
Failure and risk would not exist for an immortal person.
Without being on that airplane, I would have no need to tell my girlfriend how much I love her.
Which brings me to our next point:
4) We need death in order to live
5) Death only exists in three dimensions
We humans can navigate freely in three dimensions.
We can move up and down, forwards and backwards, and left and right.
The science enthusiasts reading this, however, will know that there is a fourth dimension we cannot navigate through freely: time.
Time is like a moving airplane set upon a destination.
A passenger can move about inside the airplane, but is unable to alter the airplane’s course.
I explained earlier that death deprives us of a potentially bright future.
Being stuck in the one-way river of time, we naturally perceive things as beginning and ending.
But if we had access to the fourth dimension, death and endings would be no different to us than births and beginnings.
A movie consists of individual frames that when put together in a certain order, creates the experience of a story being played out with a beginning, middle, and end.
If we had access to the fourth dimension, a human lifespan would be just like a movie timeline, which we could enter at any frame and watch in any direction.
We could step outside the timeline if we chose and stop watching, but that lifespan would always exist for us to revisit whenever we pleased.
6) We are lucky that we get to die
When one focuses a lot on death, it is easy to start seeing it as a problem that needs to be solved.
I hope that I have shown you in this post that death is our greatest aide in the quest for meaning and purpose in life.
It is even possible that one can develop a gratitude for death—for endings.
Richard Dawkins said:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born.
The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will in fact never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
Perhaps we would be better to take the thought “Why are we going to die? Death is such a problem!” And change it to:
“Why are we here? Life is such a bizarre and astonishing thing.”
You are able to breathe, to experience and know you are experiencing.
And the odds of you being able to do this are dizzyingly small.
Imagine standing on gigantic planet with a trillion people who look a bit like you.
One of you will be chosen at random to live, the rest will perish.
You were chosen.
But not only that, you were chosen from way more than a trillion people…
The actual odds of being alive requires a number that is so big, it would fill a 3,000-page book.
It is 1 in 10 followed by 2.6 million zeroes.
Lucky us.
To conclude:
Death is obviously not something that we would want to happen to us.
But it need not be terrifying.
If we want to earn money to do fun things, we have to work.
If we want to have children, we have to endure the pain of childbirth and the stress of caring for an infant.
If we want to be healthy, we have to exercise.
And if we want to live a meaningful existence, we must accept our impermanence.
That’s just life.
I totally agree John!
I just cannot adhere to most of what the “religious” institutions follow in lock-step.
More like...I can’t adhere...it’s not a part of me.
But as far as there being some selection being purposeful, I must admit it does seem to be that way...but perhaps we just cannot admit our randomness and don’t understand how it came into being...IDK certainly!
There does seem to be a deeper knowledge and spirit that permeates all things/us if we only keep the proper perspective - or have an event change that.
It would be cool to find out all the mysteries of the universe(s) when we die, but if we should blink out into nothing then at least we can rest assured we won’t know it.