veritasium

NEW VIDEO (which you helped improve): How to Understand the Image of a Black Hole

Added 2019-04-09 16:10:21 +0000 UTC

What to expect when you're expecting... an image of a black hole.

I dug into the literature on this one, reading papers from the 70s to finally understand why that Interstellar black hole looks like it did (and what was wrong with it).

Hope you enjoy this video as it was made with a lot of love. Hopefully it presages what is to come with the Event Horizon Telescope tomorrow. My personal prediction is that we're going to see not just a single static image of a black hole but many sequential images - a dynamic timelapse of a black hole (wishful thinking?).

Reasoning:

-atmospheric conditions are consistent in the 1mm band (in which the image was created) for around ten minutes at a time. So it makes sense to resolve to this time scale.

- the black hole at the center of our galaxy is very dynamic. It's not like a star that is fairly static allowing us to sum over time.

-Things may be orbiting in the accretion disk every 4 to 30 minutes. So averaging over time would smear out these motions.

-So... it makes sense that we could see a series of ~10 min. long images taken in one night showing things (blobs?) going around the accretion disk and establishing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are indeed seeing a black hole.

Fingers crossed!