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Highest-resolution black hole images ever taken usher in a new era (www.earth.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Anyone have a link to the full resolution image?

[+] [email protected] -7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Not how it works. They are not taking pictures with cameras. Resolution has more meaning then pixels.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

What I mean is a higher resolution than the linked site provides. NASA has an “original” image of the last time they made an image like this but I haven’t found one for this new image yet. That original is 4000x2330 but the one linked in the OP site is only 1200x729.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

wdym? how was this taken

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Radio telescopes. While I don't know the complete process of how an image is created, it's likely a composite of hundreds of thousands of points where radio wave strength was measured.

A very basic explanation is that each radio antenna likely takes a reading of some kind for each equivalent pixel in the resulting image. Over time, you can build an image.

Again, I don't know the full details of how the full image is recreated. It seems super complex reassembling millions of data points from antennas that are located on a rotating earth that is also rotating around a sun. The position of the earth probably has a huge impact on radio signal strength at any given time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

They could be very well using the earth's orbit around the sun to get better resolution - two data points from opposite sides of the orbit. What I know is that the largest "virtual" radiotelescope is literally the size of earth. The data points are synced with atomic clocks (or better), and a container of harddrives gets shipped into a datacenter to be ingested. Thats hundreds of streams (one per antenna) of data to be just synced up, before the actual analysis even can begin. (I'm just guessing after this) At this point, you have those hundreds (basically .wav files) lined up at timepoints they were sampled (one sample, one timepoint column). So row by row, so you can begin to sort out signal phase differences between the source rows.

I.e to put it shortly: an image is not taken, it is inferred and computed. Not that you even could in the first place, it's a blackhole after all.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Hehe title says highest resolution and thumbnail's a blurry mess.

Edit: wait the whole thing is blurry. Which means... we didn't even have this before?

What stopped us? Distance in space or that light simply escaped and we couldn't zoom in on finer increments?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago

Article says that it's basically the equivalent of getting an image of a bottle cap on the surface of the moon from earth. At that kind of resolution the wavelength of light actually becomes a limiting factor. They're using shorter wavelengths to get higher resolution.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

That stuff inbetween.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What's the problem? I just see a bunch of space

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Well, there's stars and dust inbetween.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You can't see space, you see the stars behind that space and those stars, turn out to be pretty bright

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Damnit, I really gotta stop assuming that people know when I'm being sarcastic. Sorry

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah... That can be difficult to tell on the internet...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

The journal article in question