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Re:Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole? by acqq on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @01:33PM (#19675571)
Thanks!

> the magic of radio interferometry is that we can record the signal to disk while preserving phase. Optical photons can not be recorded and played back with phase preserved

Why is that for the optical photons, when it’s “deeper” than just a higher frequency as you answered elsewhere?

Re:Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole? by ummonk on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @03:16PM (#19676433)
I can’t speak to any physical limitations that this poster seems to be speaking to (I only studied physics theory so I’m not too sharp on the details of lab / experimental devices / apparatuses) but I would guess intuitively that a fundamental limitation is that radio tends to be more coherent, so you aren’t relying on individual photons but rather aggregating a bunch of photons to measure a wave. In contrast, optical light tends to be incoherent (unless from a laser), so you have to measure individual photons and they aren’t really correlated with each other (so interferometry doesn’t work).