Comments by "panner11" (@panner11) on "How did they actually take this picture? (Very Long Baseline Interferometry)" video.

  1. The continuous zoom-in from a relatively wide view of the night sky all the way to the stars surrounding the black hole really puts things into perspective.
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  2. Yeah I was surprised too. But it makes sense, Andromeda is only 10 times as far away as it is wide. It's just that most of it is too dim to see with the naked eye. Exposed photos can capture how large it really is.
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  3. light travels about 300,000,000 m/s btw. In other words, 300,000 km/s. So the star travels at 24,000 km/s which is slower than light.
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  4. They did show many many images of the black hole, and it didn't show the same pattern. There's probably too much volatility to explain one particular image.
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  5. I'm guessing it's a high school physics teacher. It's not surprising, my physics teacher also didn't believe me about the accelerating expansion of the universe. I guess he has a hard time believing discoveries that go against common rhetoric at the time when he went to university.
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  6. The thing is the species that was once cavemen was able to build jets. Cavemen attempting to explain the world around them eventually led to the technology we have now. There's no point in scientific defeatism even if it's likely that most of what we understand today is not correct. It's all part of the process that most things will be proven wrong in time. It doesn't mean the steps in between are pointless, it's all necessary in achieving a better understanding. If no one takes the first steps however wrong it may be, progress will stagnate and nothing would ever be done. If you want to look down on it and conflate it to "guessing and shaking our heads" go ahead, but it sounds like you are already defeated by the uncertainty of it all.
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  7. I had no idea Andromeda spanned that much of the sky from Earth. I know it would require a lot of exposure to see it fully, but very cool.
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  8. If we thought like this, we would never advance in science. Imagine the people saying this of Galileo in his time, that his life's work was pointless; studying stars and planets we could never reach. There were those people of course and they were wrong.
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  9. Remember this is essentially an earth sized array forming a composite image. GTC's size will not do.
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  10. Basically, you only move along those lines only if no other force is acting on you. By not moving along the "straight lines", it is not bypassing gravity, but simply having another force act on you. As it happens, the ground is in the way and happens to be acting on you at all times (and you on it).
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  11. Yeah only 4 million times the mass of the Sun and about 80,000 times the volume. Very small.
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