How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?

(quantamagazine.org)

40 points | by dverlaeckt80 3 hours ago

6 comments

  • rustyhancock 3 hours ago
    One of the most remarkable aspects of physics is that Newtonian gravity calculations are quite spot on for all the parts of black holes layfolk consider important.

    1. Both predict the same critical radius, now called the Schwarzschild radius.

    2. Both predict a central singularity with formally infinite density in idealised collapse.

    3. Both predict exactly the same finite time to fall into the singularity under equivalent idealised conditions.

    4. Both give the same equation for radial free fall, using different definitions of time.

    What GR added was meaning to these things (and of course precise calculations outside of very idealised scenarios and symmetric conditions).

    • shiandow 2 minutes ago
      Could you provide a bit more detail? I don't quite see how one would define the event horizon for instance.
    • opus55_lover 20 minutes ago
      in what sense. the black hole is a result of the interaction of light with the curavture of space time. this is not modelled by newtonian gravity (or physics for that matter) at all. light is assumed to not interact with gravity in that framework in any way.
    • sandworm101 8 minutes ago
      >> Newtonian gravity calculations are quite spot on

      Which is why the concept existed long long before any talk of relativity or time dilation, back before anyone knew the name Einstein. (He was like 4yo when this came out)

      From American Physical Society: "the true “father” of the black hole concept was a humble 18th century English rector named John Michell–a man so far ahead of his scientific contemporaries that his ideas languished in obscurity, until they were re-invented more than a century later."

      https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2009/11/1783-john-michell-black-...

    • ant6n 2 hours ago
      Newtonian gravity gives infinite time to fall into black hole?

      I thought you need at least special relativity for time dilution.

      • rustyhancock 1 hour ago
        Both have finite time falling in to the singularity. If you use a point test particle Newton and GR agree on that finite time.

        That's proper time I.e. the infalling particles wristwatch time.

        In GR, external observers would never see the infalling particle cross the event horizon but that's a coordinate artifact. If using our wrist watch time for that particle.

        • gradus_ad 1 hour ago
          But observers can see a black hole grow over time, so does that mean they observe growth without consumption?
          • rustyhancock 47 minutes ago
            Were past what I could confidently answer (if I'm wrong hopefully someone corrects me) but I'm not sure I follow, if the BH grows it would encompass what we see as nearly smeared over it's horizon.

            There's also surprising results around what the external gravitation field appears to be for an object.

            I.e. no matter how mass is distributed behind the event horizon externally it looks like the spherically symmetric Schwartzchild metric.

            That has implications for what will emit gravitational waves.

            Eithway, smeared over the horizon but never crossed and crossed the horizon externally look the same from a gravity perspective.

        • raattgift 33 minutes ago
          > external observers would never

          Consider two strongly-interacting freefallers related by a boost colliding and sticking together (like a black tshirt and a floof of white pet fur) close to the apparent horizon.

          Consider a freefaller and an accelerated observer meeting close to the apparent horizon. The freefaller here could be distant starlight and the accelerated observer a powerful rocket.

          Are you saying these coincidences are forbidden in the vicinity of an apparent horizon (which is locally detectable), or are you distinguishing between the apparent horizon and the (global, but not locally detectable) event horizon?

          Where is the point where the t-shirt will remain unsullied by unremovable fur? What light does an outwards-pointing camera on the spaceship see?

          Visser [2014] "Physical observability of horizons", https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.127502 aka https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7295 about the variety of horizons about which one should be careful.

          The equivalence principle demands that the local free-fall frames on the t-shirt and the fur are both smooth. At an enormous black hole, the curvature is also small (we can make the black hole so large that the curvature and tidal effects are comparable to the surface of the Earth). The result is the "no drama" conjecture, wherein nothing special happens immediately upon crossing the event horizon. Detecting the apparent horizon requires some cleverness to shear apart a cloud of coffee grinds or the like while the components are variously on hyperbolic trajectories (and will escape the region around black hole) and infalling trajectories (which will be stuck below a trapping surface).

          The shirt-and-fur will form a single extended object and continue to infall togther. A violation of this would be a violation of Local Lorentz Invariance, which would be beyond known physics, all of which enjoys LLI (and global Lorentz Invariance in the idealized flat spacetime of Special Relativity).

          This gets trickier just inside the horizon because of of causal disintegration: electromagnetic interactions from the inner part of an extended object can no longer reach up to the outer part of the extended object. For a time the outer part of the extended object can "catch up", but eventually intermolecular and other forces will fail, such that the tshirt will not experience being furry.

          Local physics is local. The tshirt-fur meeting above the apparent horizon may be too redshifted to be visible by various classes of observer above. The electromagnetic radiation from them meeting below the apparent horizon is stuck behind a trapping surface; observers above will not see a furry tshirt.

          Generically an accelerated freefaller shooting itself through a horizon will see freefallers as being fast (clocks running fast, high velocities). The effect increases as the horizon is approached, so a camera looking back at distant starlight sees a high blueshift and a focusing into a small region of the accelerated infaller's "sky". One can analyse this in several ways, but the acceleration/gravitation equivalence means the rocketing infaller is not much different from an observer standing still on a planet freely falling into the BH, or alternatively one can consider its suprageodesic in a convenient system of coordinates in a setting like Vaiyda's absorbing null dust. The inwards-accelerating rocket camera sees a blueshift from its own acceleration (because that is equivalent to gravitational blueshifting) and from the falling of the distant starlignt down to the black hole, which will be blueshifted in the backwards pointing camera.

          Finally on the inwards-accelerating rocket, we have Unruh/Rindler in play locally (and local is fairly large for an enormous black hole); the Rindler horizon is ahead of them, so the backwards view is not behind the Rindler horizon. They can still receive light from outside. You don't want to collide with anything on an intersecting geodesic if you are this type of infaller, and eventually that includes highly-blueshifted starlight. Sizzle.

    • ziiinq 2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • myrmidon 2 hours ago
    What I find really interesting is that black holes don't really "require" infinite density; the mass density inside the event horizon never exceeds neutron star levels, and becomes in fact lower the heavier the black hole gets (=> event horizon enclosed volume grows faster than mass).
    • Borg3 1 hour ago
      For large blackholes of course. And this actually makes other interesting property. Our universe is in fact giant blackhole with our own event horizon outside it. This also support cyclic big bang theory. Once entire universe will collapse to singularity, the smallest possible particles shatters, leaving pure energy. Pure energy doesnt have "static" mass so no gravity => kaboom, we have new iteration. Theory of multiverse (multiple black holes aka universes) is out of scope here because we will never be able to escape ours.
      • adrianN 1 hour ago
        It is my understanding that energy produces a gravitational field regardless of the form it takes.
      • nkrisc 58 minutes ago
        What is “pure” energy?
        • ButlerianJihad 21 minutes ago
          It is the subtitle of a #3 synth-pop hit by Information Society, which debuted only 16 months before the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem, "Pump Up the Jam".
  • spottedmarley 2 hours ago
    First you'll need a camera that can detect mathematical equations.
  • fuzzfactor 1 hour ago
    Nothing beats a close-up.
  • JohnKemeny 2 hours ago
    Is it just me, or could they have added a, say, picture of a black hole?
    • cogogo 1 hour ago
      I thought I was the only one. But there is a really good video linked at the bottom of the page that has the two images and a summary of the work to build them.

      I also loved the analogies of reading the date of a coin in LA from NYC or seeing a tangerine on the moon. But they kept talking about how surprisingly small black holes are. I wanted that described in relative terms. Maybe I just did not read carefully enough but are they the size of a pinhead? The solar system? I know I can look this up.

      • elvircrn 28 minutes ago
        "bottom of the page that has the two images and a summary of the work to build them."

        A picture + explanation below it would carry more weight than this entire article tenfold.

    • bcraven 2 hours ago
      It's the one in your head that you picture, as not many have been taken:

      https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/astronomers-reveal-firs...

      • somat 1 hour ago
        The EHT is a remarkable achievement in datagathering and collaboration. But I always sort of wonder, a bit of doubt if you will. seeing as the process(simplified nearly to the point of absurdity) is that of building a image generator based off what we think a black hole looks like then feeding it very vague spectral data and getting it to generate an image. isn't that a huge confirmation bias. That is. of course the black hole looks like simulated ones, that is how the generator was programmed to make them.
      • GreenLightGo 2 hours ago
        Why does it look like it's moving to me?
        • Cthulhu_ 24 minutes ago
          Possibly because it's blurry your brain is trying to do stuff?
      • lifestyleguru 2 hours ago
        I remember times when the best available photo of Pluto looked like this.
    • ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago
      This is a transcript of a 60-minute podcast. Would you like that TIFF in Zmodem format? Or they could read it out in base64?
  • monster_truck 2 hours ago
    I'd use a camera, personally