The Astronomy Thread

TheBeagle said:

It says "Science News" right there at the top!

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I had a woman recently ask me for an opinion about some medication. So I gave her an opinion and she goes "well, you're not a doctor".

At what point in this minding my own business and being asked a specific question about my personal opinion did i claim to be a fucking doctor? And what does that have to do with the objective veracity of my statements?

WOMEN.

iannis said:

I had a woman recently ask me for an opinion about some medication. So I gave her an opinion and she goes "well, you're not a doctor".

At what point in this minding my own business and being asked a specific question about my personal opinion did i claim to be a fucking doctor? And what does that have to do with the objective veracity of my statements?

WOMEN.

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Haha exactly right. I was minding my own biz playing a little POE and looking at fishing reports and she texts me with this amazing news, informing me that she's a bit of a "space geek". My inner autist then engaged in a conversation that I should have left alone. Example #1,742 of why I've never been married.

Vanessa said:

LoL; so our local black holes were too small with too much "space dust" and other celestial shit (for lack of better words, sorry) gumming up the works than this one that was much further away but more massive and less visual occlusions?

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Yes. Black hole remnants from supernova and such are like 10 miles wide. The reason we can't 'see' the one in the center of our galaxy is that there are 10s of thousands of lightyears between us and it, and there is a ton of dust clouds between us and it (or other material) that prevents a clear radar signal from reaching us from there. Black holes at the centers of galaxys are much larger and the local environment has a higher matter density than around most star massed black holes.

Really disappointed the image of Sag A* wasn't something like this:


Seriously though, I hope we throw more effort into studying and detecting black holes. Just studying the event horizon of a black hole in more detail would provide us with some huge breakthroughs, let alone studying the singularity itself. Personaly I think most of our future technology is going to be based on understanding gravity and how to manipulate it. Probably how we eventually destroy ourselves too. Really wish we would smarten up as a species and focus on getting our asses out into the universe, so many of our problems would disappear if we weren't bound to this single rock.

Yeah, it's literally because the angle is bad.

The milky way is giving us a duckface.

Vanessa said:

My question for the big brains here; why did we look to another entire galaxy for the first pic of a black hole? I'd think one in our own Milky Way would have sufficed? Or is it a question of how much surrounding matter there is around it versus proximity and size?

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M87 is face on to us (20 degrees from pointing mostly right at us). Like looking at the top of a plate. Sag A* in our galaxy is obscured by the plane of dust and shit in the way. Second is the absolute size of the blackholes. M87's supermassive blackhole is 1500 times more massive than our own central blackhole. It is something like 55 million light years away. However when you look at it from here, the relative size of M87's supermassive and our own is basically the same. The size/distance cancel eachother out. In the same way the moon seems as big as your thumb if your thumb is close enough to your face.

Another feature of M87's monster blackhole is that the material in the accretion disks of both black holes travel at about the same top speed, but because M87 is absolutely enormous a lap around it just takes longer. Imagine putting 200mph Nascars on a 1500 mile oval instead of a 1 mile. It would take them an hour to travel 200/1500 miles. On the 1 mile, those same cars will make 200 laps. So when you observe M87 the disk you look at for a 12 hour span changes much more slowly because of the same speed aspect of the fastest material around the black hole. And Sag A* given how much smaller it is can change on a scale of minutes. Just like watching the Nascar race on the 1 mile oval. (You're watching these two nascar tracks through telescopes and at distances that make them appear the same relative size)

M87, is the easier object to image and process the data from.

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khorum said:

LOL coincidence I'm sure:

"AH MAH GAWD U GUISE I FOUND A BLACK HOLE TEEEEHHEEE"

I bet it was on her instagram and pinterest within seconds. Next to her lululemon wishlist and her favorite avocade pumpkin spice smoothie recipe.

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Ahh Lululemon. Name picked because the founder hated japs and wanted them to struggle saying it.

Raffs in shitlord

Since it hasn't been posted yet, here's a TED talk Katie Bouman did a few years ago where she explains how her algorithm works.






*slaps 5 petabytes of hard drives* These bad boys can fit so much fucking porn on them.

She wrote 0.22% of the code but gave 100% of the TED talks.

"crashed" sure ok.

It's probably 100 feet under the lunar surface deploying the robot constructors to build the first Mossad Moon Base as we speak.