🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@RickBrandon Yes, and cocoholate chip muffins. Chocolate really works for a lot of breakfast stuff, no surprise it works here really.

@RickBrandon I have some friends who don't fit this meme, but the vast majority of Americans fit the bill.

@Saederup92 The thing is, america DOESNT have two major political parties. They always vote, mostly, for two major parties, but there is literally nothing giving those two parties an advantage.

@klaatu They have two versions here, chocolat, and then other colors that I havent tried (I think some are multi-colored).

I'd love to try New Zealand food and treats!

@tyil LOL thats exactly what my dutch friends said :)

This pretty much sums up life in america these days. Nothing but extremist fanatics on both sides, it is so sad :(

So I just tried a traditional dutch breakfast snack for the first time and it was amazing. You put butter/margarine on some bread (usually untoasted but fresh) then add some chocolate jimmies that actually taste like chocolate (not that American crap). The result is suprisingly tasty.

absolute truth, fuck the majority.

"I dont choose enemies, I simply design my world so those in the wrong will be their own enemy. You dont damn the cliff for the man who chose to walk off of it"

@raucao Oh sure, here are a few.

@raucao I also never claimed there were previous photos of "mass around a black hole". The picture released also wasnt mass around a black hole. there were photons that passed near, or emitted from the area around a black hole. Yes that is a new achievement, the WHOLE achievement was novel in many ways indeed. It just wasnt the first picture of a black hole as all, it was something much better than that.

@raucao Well I wouldnt say its splitting hairs. Its applying the same definition we use for stars when we use the word "seen" in astronomy. We see light, filtered through light-years of interstellar gas, that resolves to less than a pixel for the actual object (the star). Same is true of the blackhole, we see the light that shows the blackhole, but the blackhole itself resolves to less than a pixel.

And no, when you look at stars none of them are greater than a pixel when you look with your eye. Telescopes can do it but only for a few very rare stars. When Beetlegeuse could be resolved beyond 1 pixel it was a HUGE deal.

I assume you dont read many astronomical/physics scientific journals.

Don/'t take my word when it comes to the "absurd" assertion. Here is a voice recording with a scientist She talks about and confirms all the points I said about stars being unable to be resolved in photos (they act as point sources, sub-pixel sizes).

Here read this section of the transcript it talks about how we cant resolve ANY stars with a single telescope and there are VERY few stars we have resolved and in all those cases it used interferometry and multiple telescopes. You know exactly like the "absurd" assertion I made earlier. Also here is the full link.

http://www.astronomycast.com/2012/04/ep-256-resolution/

Pamela: Well, it would be able to detect it because there’s still light coming off – so this is one of those things in astronomy that can get confusing at times. You have a light source, it’s radiating light, all of that light quite happily hits a pixel, and there’s a difference between whether or not you detect it, and whether or not you resolve it, so you’re able to detect that light, but you’re not able to resolve it into, “well, what does that look like? What’s the shape of that?” So we’re able to detect things like stars. We can’t resolve stars, but we detect them all the time, and so this is the difference between pretty picture, and blob of light — and mostly we just see blobs of light.

Fraser: Right, all of the…so even with the Hubble space telescope, if you’re going to view a distant star, you’re just going to get the light coming off of it, but you’re not going to resolve the disk. But there’s a few cases, right, where the resolution of the detector is good enough that you actually can resolve the disk, right? Hasn’t, like, Betelgeuse been resolved?

Pamela: Betelgeuse has been resolved; we’ve resolved the stars in the Alpha Centauri system, and in all of these cases, it wasn’t one single telescope doing the job — and this is where it gets tricky. The ability of a telescope to resolve an image is based on two different factors (we’re going to keep having things that are based on two different factors today): one of those factors is what color of light are you’re using. If the color of light you’re using has a really long wavelength, well, if your wavelength is longer than the object you’re trying to look at, the wavelength isn’t going to allow you to resolve the object. So you need to use shorter wavelengths of light to be able to resolve finer details. Now, at the same time, you have to be able to take all of those wavelengths and combine them in a meaningful way, and the more wavelengths you can combine, the better you’re going to do, and the more wavelengths you can combine depends on how big is your detector. Now, this starts to work in a kind of screwball way because it’s not actually “I have one, two, three, four, five stacked across and I’m collecting all five.” It actually has to do with the separation between these two is, well, actually usually 1000s of wavelengths, and I can cut a hole out of the center, or I can actually cut a whole lot of holes out, and we call that the very large array in New Mexico. So the resolution that you get depends on how far apart are the two most extreme wavelengths that you detect in your baseline between the two telescopes, and so that baseline, or the diameter of your single mirror, your single dish — that defines your resolution in combination with what wavelength you’re looking at.

@raucao By that logic we have never seen any pictures of extraterrestrial stars either (aside from beetleguese).

But even then its more complex than that. Blackholes themselves can never be seen no matter how many pixels they resolve to. The only thing we can see is the einstein rings they cause. Those have taken up many pixels in the past just as they did in the most recent picture.

So still not the "first" no matter how you slice it.

@carbontwelve
Well I would be ok with it if it were corrected, in detail, in the article. But usually it isnt. With that said I'm not upset about it so much as just wish people understood what they were saying and what it really means.

@snder

@RomeoTBravo It is extremely cool and very amazing indeed. I am just a stickler for accuracy is all.

As I understand it interferometry isnt just about how far apart your constituent telescopes are but how many of them you have as well. If you really want to have useful interferometry in space you'd need a cloud of telescopes. Doable, but a bit more expensive. It also would have to orbit since just having one at each lagrange point wouldnt help as much.

@carbontwelve
And yes it is absolutely an achievement worth recognizing and applauding. It just isnt the "first-ever" is all.

@snder

@carbontwelve
Yes thats what I said, this is not the first ever picture, just the first one with multi-pixel resolution of the event horizon.

The same happens with stars. virtually all starts we see are sub-pixel in the sky. We have only two stars I know of with multi-pixel resolutions. But it would be wrong to call those "the first ever" pictures of stars too.

@snder

Attached are some older pictures of blackholes that predate the one released today, they are real, not simulations. Enjoy.

Just a reminder. Today's "first-ever" picture of a blackhole is not the first-ever. We have countless pictures of blackholes. This is just the first time we have been able to resolve the event horizon such that it takes up more than a single pixel. But like with all blackholes the blackhole itself is invisible and all you can see is the gravitational lensing around it. Something we have had for decades now.

It isnt the first ever photo of a blackhole, it is just the highest resolution of a blackhole we have.

#science #NASA #Blackhole

@Surasanji Yea I can see the similarity.

@snder "bh"?

I mean the only reason its any different than a star is because it is invisible. So really you can NEVER get a picture of a blackhole. The **only** thing you can take a picture of is the gravitational lensing effect.

So by that logic we still dont have a picture of a blackhole, unless you consider the lensing effect to be a picture of the blackhole in which case we already had such pictures :).