[HN Gopher] Images of gamma-ray flare from supermassive black ho...
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       Images of gamma-ray flare from supermassive black hole M87
        
       Author : gmays
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2024-12-16 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (newsroom.ucla.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ucla.edu)
        
       | ttul wrote:
       | What blows my mind is the fact that the jet emanating from M87 is
       | thousands of lightyears across. This means you could live out
       | your life on a planet orbiting a star near the jet and probably
       | wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary. The scale of that
       | structure is absolutely mind-boggling.
        
         | goatking wrote:
         | Wouldn't that ray destroy any life on any nearby planet?
        
           | tetris11 wrote:
           | I think the poster above meant "wouldn't notice anything out
           | of the ordinary until it's too late."
        
       | gleenn wrote:
       | I just wish there were a higher resolution image than the one
       | linked in that website. The original photos of M87 are so
       | stunning and have such a cool story where they split the research
       | group into two teams and they both came to the same conclusion
       | about the discovery of the black hole. The photos that go along
       | with the original discovery were my wallpaper forever because it
       | just looks so awesome.
        
         | nullc wrote:
         | There is some amount of controversy of the EHT imaging process
         | because there are pretty strong priors backed into it (like a
         | lot of modern physics observations, e.g. LIGO)-- and at least
         | one group suggests that you get a similar looking donut
         | observation if you just feed noise into their imaging process.
        
       | undersuit wrote:
       | Too see the flare from the side bothers me the most. There's so
       | much energy traveling away from us that it's lighting up space
       | enough for the flare, again not pointing at us, to outshine the
       | galaxy.
        
       | nullc wrote:
       | The M87 jet can be optically imaged by amateurs too, here is an
       | image I took using a 400mm f/2.8 camera lens, a cooled cmos
       | sensor, and many hours of observation:
       | https://nt4tn.net/astro/M87jet.png
       | 
       | The image is a crop and contrast boost of this image:
       | https://nt4tn.net/astro/virgo2.jpg
       | 
       | Light pollution renders such observations increasingly difficult,
       | of course... but Marin's ban on outdoor advertising at least
       | makes it possible here, unlike much of the bay area where stars
       | can hardly be observed at all.
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-16 23:00 UTC)