https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-photographed-1.5081243 Little more info on how they used an array of 8 telescopes at 6 different locations to take that picture and some other background info.
And to think: somewhere deep inside of that thing, a tiny Matthew McConaughy is yelling at us from a never-ending closet.
Fun fact: even though from his perspective, falling into the black hole only took a matter of minutes, from the perspective of any observer outside the event horizon he will never reach it. The time dilation equations go to infinity at the event horizon.
And all that just to talk to his daughter-grandma for 5 minutes and then get kicked out of her hospital room.
Luckily his ship had that ejector seat. Yeah.... WHY in the fuck did a spaceship have an eject button? So you can avoid collision by being safely launched into a Perfect Vaccuum?
Fortunately there's been a lot of press around the lead scientist on the team who got us that black hole picture. Her name (yes, HER) is Katie Bouman, and here she is in 2017 giving a TED talk on how one might take a picture of a black hole:
There’s a picture somewhere that’s a side by side: the top picture, and the famous picture of the lady who wrote the code to get the first astronauts to the moon.
Yeah, the real excitement of this photo is WHAT it is, not how it looks. I have a very similar picture on my phone, when I zoomed in on the solar eclipse.
That lady had a crew of people helping, but none the less it was in (I think) Assembly and stacked higher than her. Crazy shit.
As far as I'm concerned, Elon has earned the right to tweet whatever the fuck he wants with impunity.
I’m still getting used to the phrase “drone ship,” never mind re-usable rockets like that. What an amazing time to be alive. And I hope he does keep tweeting whatever the fuck he wants to. Sure, it’s sometimes illegal and/or messes with the stock markets and stuff like that, but that doesn’t impact me so I think it’s amusing as hell.