One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark matter idea

Re:One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark mat... by Etheryte on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:08AM (#19603470)

Given the sheer amount of data (870 megapixels every 90 seconds for a night) you will only find or not find things you're very specifically looking for. The volume of data is simply too large for random discovery. As the article covers, looking for a very specific type of interaction, the researchers were still faced with 15,500 possible matches that they then needed to filter.

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Re:One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark mat... by EnigmaticLion on Monday April 08, 2019 @09:15AM (#19604859)

7 hours of observation, one image every 90 seconds: that's 280 images. My phone takes 8 megapixel photos and those are about 2 MB, based on that the 870 megapixel image would be about 200 MB. 200 MB * 280 = 56 GB. Doesn't sound that much.

Did they publish the images? I'm sure many astronomers would be happy to examine them.

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Re:One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark mat... by blattimwind on Monday April 08, 2019 @11:20AM (#19605977)

This isn't a smartphone camera. The raw images are 16 bit monochrome, which is about 2 GB. Additionally you'll make dark exposures etc. to compensate for errors, which overall results in about ~13 GB per shot [1].

[1] https://hsc.mtk.nao.ac.jp/pipedoc_e/e_hsc/index.html

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Re:One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark mat... by ChrisSD on Monday April 08, 2019 @11:30AM (#19606096)

So 280 images at 870 megapixels each is 243,600,000,000 pixels to scan through? That is a lot unless you can filter for something specific. That's why they didn't simply stumble upon anything else significant.

Yes future analysis of the images could potentially turn up something else but that wasn't what was asked.

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