How to Understand the Image of a Black Hole | Veritasium
We are about to see the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. But what is that image really showing us? This is an awesome paper on the topic by J.P. Luminet: Image of a spherical black hole with thin accretion disk Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 75, no. 1-2, May 1979, p. 228-235 https://ve42.co/luminet
In the future people are going to ask me about cool events I was alive for like “what was it like when they took a picture of the first black hole” and I’m just gonna be like “man idk, that was neat I guess”.Too much stuff happens in a day, I’m desensitized.
I’ve still been working on the novel I am trying to write with my celestial body characters in my spare time (gone through so many drafts already) but I’m not sure if it will ever see the light of day.
The celestial body characters originally started out as comics sketched out by me in middle school, and after I realized I would never be able to color the longer-form comics AND the one-off gag comics on a regular basis, I decided to try to write the longer stories instead.
The problem is that it feels like people expect books to be much more realistic than comics, and it has been a nightmare trying to get a story that ultimately is about love between a sunlike star and a supermassive black hole into a realistic framework. It is a fundamentally unrealistic story, yet one that requires so much science knowledge it has as much science in it as a hard science fiction novel, without the benefits of being, you know, plausible.
I recently dragged the old comics from high school out of a drawer, and admired, in spite of their crudeness and complete lack of realistic worldbuilding, the sheer irreverence of them.
Want a galaxy that’s a literal city? Sure.
Want Wolf-Rayet star biker gangs? Sure.
A supermassive black hole that can just go to the grocery store? Sure.
…I’m going to be posting the comic called “The Galactic City,” as it is the first time I conceived of the setting of a distant quasar that’s a rough and violent city of stars and black holes. It’s no longer a literal city (more of a metaphorical one) nowadays, but I do have a certain nostalgia for when I just didn’t care.
I’m just kind of burnt out on digital art for now…so instead have this chalk pencil drawing of Stella encountering a traveling black hole.
It is a little-known effect, but if the magnetic field strengths in a black hole’s jets are asymmetric, the black hole will experience a net thrust. A large asymmetry in jet power is possible, and so in principle, one could get even a supermassive black hole moving.
Have a very bloated Tartarus after he’s feasted on gas kicked up by a galaxy merger and then eaten the other galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
Of course after a few hours his space-time will have settled down completely and he’ll be extremely hungry again, but for now he’s enjoying digesting the other SMBH the ring-down.
