Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by koheripbal on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @04:54PM
(#19628698)
It's too bad we cannot see the accretion disk edge-on as in the video. That would have made it a perfect prediction. Maybe it's so thin that it's overwhelmed by the projections of the top and bottom of the back side of the disk.
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Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by darkhorn on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:02PM
(#19630196)
May be we can see higher resolution if we build an additional telescope.
Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by dredmorbius on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:26PM
(#19630321)
More distant (longer baseline), not merely additional sensors.
Resolving power is proportional to the (virtual) aperture size, not the total sensor area (that gives more signal strength).
Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by ben_w on Thursday April 11, 2019 @03:27AM
(#19631892)
Given the observation period has been multiple years, does that virtual size include the orbit of the Earth? Or is there something that limits it to still being Earth-sized?
Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by exelius on Thursday April 11, 2019 @01:06AM
(#19631298)
So put some telescopes in orbit around the Moon and Mars.
Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by Cthulhu_ on Thursday April 11, 2019 @07:10AM
(#19633021)
A guy on Reddit actually asked this in the AMA. While that would increase the resolution, it would also be extremely difficult. The algorithms used to combine the data from the dishes relies on the exact position of the dish being known at the time of measuring, to a precision of fractions of millimeters. It's already hard to do on the earth's surface, but imagine doing it with a sattelite zipping around the earth at 20K km/s, or the moon at >1 km/s around the earth, or Mars at 24K km/s around the sun.
Re:Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]
by wool_gather on Thursday April 11, 2019 @11:58AM
(#19635950)
Not to mention getting the data back down here. For the analysis of M87, there were multiple petabytes generated: they had to use good old sneakernet and ship hard drives.