The first picture of a black hole opens a new era of astrophysics
This is what a black hole looks like.
A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,” Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said April 10 in Washington, D.C., at one of seven concurrent news conferences. The results were also published in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, said in the Washington, D.C., news conference. Seeing one “is a Herculean task,” she said.
That’s because black holes are notoriously hard to see. Their gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape across the boundary at a black hole’s edge, known as the event horizon. But some black holes, especially supermassive ones dwelling in galaxies’ centers, stand out by voraciously accreting bright disks of gas and other material. The EHT image reveals the shadow of M87’s black hole on its accretion disk. Appearing as a fuzzy, asymmetrical ring, it unveils for the first time a dark abyss of one of the universe’s most mysterious objects.
“It’s been such a buildup,” Doeleman said. “It was just astonishment and wonder… to know that you’ve uncovered a part of the universe that was off limits to us.”
Well I’m sitting in hospital unexpectedly - nothing too serious. I was going to post this last night but I was in too much pain.
So this is a proof of concept. The word “magical” is used far too much but that was my ambition. Something of unknown use and unknown provenance.
Proof of concept is the build I make all the mistakes on - motor too fast, planets too large and high, LEDs wiring wrong and ugly battery packs. Internally this might not be saleable quality.
The video isn’t great, sorry. When I get home I will take some still photos of all the decorations and detail. It was inspired by those magnetic ballerina jewellery boxes from the 1960s. She would dance around a mirror when the box was opened.
I initially covered the neodymium magnets and attached the planet on a post. Wrong. They fell down, stuck to each other with such force they ended up broken. So I’ve gone for simple using the magnetic force to hold the metal spheres. I will include several spare magnets and planets.
I’ve been waiting to make these for a long time. Finally had all the ingredients and a bit of bravery. What many people don’t realise is making something new is always a risk, possibly ruining expensive supplies. Fortunately these turned out well. A simple glass locket filled with a vintage pocket watch spring, tiny metallic “planet” spheres, a half round golden “sun” all fixed in place with clear resin. It makes for a subtle yet intriguing piece of jewelry. Understated.
The tiny ones are seriously small - the lockets are under an inch wide. I’ve attempted some reality to the planets: Mercury is tiny and silver, Venus earth’s sister planet is gold and the same size as Earth, Earth is silver, Mars smaller than Earth and copper. The giants start with Jupiter large in copper, Saturn slightly smaller than Jupiter and silver tone, Uranus is gold, Neptune is smaller and silver and finally, Pluto, tiny and metallic black. I can’t keep any accuracy in relation to the size of the sun - it’s seriously huge in comparison.
The larger one, just over an inch wide, was gold but arrived very scratched. Instead of it sitting in my pile of rejects I decided to “distress” the patina to a brushed copper with the original gold poking through in places. It works. It also has a very light dusting of holographic glitter as a star field.
If there is the demand I thought about customising these. With a birth date, time and place I can generate a natal sun chart - where the planets were at the time of their birth. If there is serious clumping I might have to take some artistic license when positioning all the planets. It would require a 2 week build time for supplies and for the resin layers to cure.
If you are looking for a masculine gift I can put them on a black rubber or leather cord.
This Seite, a sami cult wooden idol, comes from the Lapland Sorsele parish in Överstjuktan and was deposited from the Historical Museum to the Nordic Museum in 1943 in Stockholm.
Wood seites (Värromuirroa) are made from natural materials, such as wood or stone and are used for sacrifices to the Sami god world. In connection with these figures, finds of reindeer horns have usually been made. however, there are hardly any of these idols left in Lapland
A few days ago I read an article by Clifford C. Rickey, about how this idol various body parts communicate through a deliberately organized sign language and a cosmological representation. This is a language not only found in the Sami culture, but in many other cultures such as the Native Americans of North America. However, it is not always easy to interpret. For example, the different body parts represent different phrases or signal elements like the head for ”warrior”, hand for ”the steward of the Sun” etc. This seite also has different engravings like “X” for “transformation”. The site was located by a sacred stream. These figures, made in the body shape of either a human, animal or plant, are most commonly found next to water. The ancient cosmological metaphor is made of the water cycle and the body represents “Tree of Life”, where water, along with the water-spirits, enters through the roots (feet) up through the body. It must have been extremely important to the faithful, which I interpret from a letter wtitten by Axel Callberg to the museum says “I spoke with the old ladies at the residential homes, who knew of the god and they were utterly dismayed that their vicar had shipped the Seite from the sacred stream.” Photo by me from the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. (@nordiskamuseet)
Where did we come from and how did our world begin? For thousands of years, people from cultures all around the globe have devised stories to explain the creation of their domains. In this essay for Glencairn Museum News, Dr. Jennifer Houser Wegner, Associate Curator in the Egyptian Section at the Penn Museum, introduces us to the fascinating subject of ancient Egyptian creation myths, including the cosmological context for a number of objects in Glencairn Museum’s Egyptian gallery.
Today we have another short post, this time about Anaxagoras. Russell asserts his main importance as being the person who first introduced philosophy to Athens. He was a student of Anaximenes, and in his later life he was an influence on Socrates.
He was born in Clazomenae, a costal town of Ionia, around 500 BCE. He lived in Athens from 462 – 432 BCE, the golden age. It is believed that he was…
Probing the solar system’s prenatal history Science 8 August 2014 This is an overview and intro to Maria Lugaro et al, “Stellar origin of the 182Hf cosmochronometer and the presolar history of solar system matter” in Science 8 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6197 pp. 650-653 [not open access]
The Sun’s age (T0) is inferred from the most accurate estimate for condensation of the solar system’s first solids, which occurred 4567.3 ± 0.16 million years ago (Ma).
The epoch before the birth of the Sun reflects progressive isolation of the matter precursor to the solar system from the chemically evolving galaxy.
This process leads to the formation of the giant molecular cloud from which a dense fragment collapsed to form the Sun and planets.
The current architecture of the inner solar system was largely established within 100 million years of solar system formation.
In speaking of “Taoist thought” I have often throughout this work used the term as a convenient shorthand for “primeval Chinese thought.” Strictly speaking, this usage is historically incorrect. Laozi is traditionally regarded as the founder of Taoism and is associated with “primordial” or “original” Taoism. Whether he actually existed is disputed. According to tradition the classic text attributed to him, the Tao Te Ching, was written around the 6th century BCE. The oldest extant text, however, dates to the late 4th century BCE. The earliest strata of the I Ching predate both these historical periods by many centuries, if not millennia. Taoism derived its cosmological notions from the philosophy of yin and yang, and from that of the Five Phases or Five Elements. Both these schools of thought were overwhelmingly influenced and shaped by exposure to the oldest known text of ancient Chinese classics, the I Ching.[1]
The actual symbolic logic of Taoism, although derived from the I Ching is extremely simplistic compared with that of the original upon which it is based. Whereas the philosophy of yinandyang as presented in the Tao Te Ching comprises little more than a two-dimensional cycle of two-valued elements, in the I Ching these two represent vectors in a six-dimensional combinatorial manifold of 64 hexagrams (1,2). Clearly, it is a difference like that between night and day. It is, in fact, a literal comparing of 22 with 26, the latter holding many more possibilities. The actual difference[2] in the logic and geometry emerging from the two is greater even than it appears at first. It eventuates not from just a simple geometric progression but from a mandalic intertwining and association of logical elements that give rise to different amplitudes of dimension as well as to a greater number of dimensions. This mandalic interweaving leads also to a richer catalogue of relationship types.[3]
Long viewed as mainly an ancient text of Chinese divination,theI Chingencompasses many more categories of thought - - - among them symbolic logic, geometry, and combinatorics. As a treatise which deals with combinatorics alone, it soars without equal, the first known compendium of combinatorial elements and still one of the finest. The logic and geometry that are embedded in the hexagram system of the I Ching are best understood in terms of dimensions and vectors akin to those in Cartesian systematics, and of logic gates analogous to the truth tables of Boolean algebra. And still the cognoscente will want to explore beyond the pertinency of these disciplines as also beyond Taoism to find the full meaning and intent of the I Ching.[4]
Having existed for millenia, and itself a treatise regarding change[5] in its many aspects, it would be inconceivable that the I Ching as we have it today is as it was in its beginnings. Popular at all societal levels through its entire existence, reinterpretations and reworkings have been myriad. Confucianism in particular interlaced its own brand of philosophical and “ethical-sociopolitical teachings” during and after the fifth century BCE. Other schools of thought added their unique perspectives to what became essentially a massive melting pot of schematization, one not always self-consistent by any means.
When one attempts to uncover the original face of the I Ching the difficulties encountered soon appear insurmountable. If involved in such a venture, it is imperative to bear in mind the bedrock strata of the work were in some ways more ingenuous, and in some more intricate, than the traditional version that has come down to us. The earliest layers arose in context of a preliterate oral tradition with all the many unique aspects of being that entails. In some ways the golden age of the I Ching ended with coming of the written word and literacy. The multidimensional logic that was readily accommodated by an oral tradition foundered and eventually was all but lost in the unrelenting techno-sociological onslaught of script with its associated inevitable linearity. Anyone who hopes to excavate the buried multidimensional logic of the primordial I Ching can expect to do a good deal of laborious digging.
[1] Two diagrams known as bagua (or pa kua) that figure prominently in the I Ching and its Commentaries predate their appearances in the I Ching. The Lo Shu Square is sometimes associated with the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua or trigrams, and the Yellow River Map is sometimes associated with the Earlier Heaven arrangement of trigrams. Both are linked to astronomical events of the sixth millennium BCE. Although part of Chinese mythology, they played an important role in development of Chinese philosophy. The Lo Shu Square is intimately connected with the legacy of the most ancient Chinese mathematical and divinatory traditions. The Lo Shu is the unique normal magic square (1,2) of order three (every normal magic square of order three is derived from Lo Shu by rotation or reflection). [Wikipedia]
[2] Taking into account both changing lines and unchanging lines of hexagrams there are four possible variants for each line: unchanging yin, unchanging yang, changing yin, and changing yang. This results in a total of 46 or 4096 possible different line combinations for each six-line figure. This allows for an enormous number of logical / geometric configurations, all of which map to various points of the mandalic cube or, in terms of Cartesian coordinates, to discretized points of the three-dimensional cube bounded by the eight Cartesian triads which have coordinates of +1 and/or -1 in all possible combinations (corresponding to the eight trigrams.)
To this point changing lines have not been discussed to avoid overcomplicating already complicated matters too soon. Changing lines play an indispensable role in all changes of yin lines to yang lines and vice versa, and therefore, in changes of one hexagram to another. They are also essential elements in formation of the geometric line segment generated by the I Ching hexagrams which I have earlier referred to as the "Taoist line“ and which we have yet to broach fully. Mandalic line segments uniformly comprise sixteen interrelated elements, hexagrams with changing and/or unchanging lines. Though various mandalic line segments have different compositions in terms of six-dimensional hexagrams, these hexagrams can always be reduced in logical and geometrical terms to sixteen bigram forms containing changing and/or unchanging lines. These bigram sets are all identical. No other variants are possible, since 42 equals 16. In this sense there is a single species of mandalic line segment but one which takes on different characteristics in different dimensional contexts. Every hexagram has a commentary appended to each of its six lines, which annotation is intended to be reflected upon only if the line is a changing one at time of consulting the oracle. Justly put, this system is brilliant beyond belief.
[3] Understand here that ‘relationship types’ may variously refer to human relationships in a society, to particle relationships in context of the atom, or to any other species of relationship one might imagine.
[4] For an exhaustive listing of linkstoI Ching related materials on the Web see here.
[5] Indeed, an alternative name of the I Ching in English is Book of Changes. The ensconced multidimensional logic encoded in the original work purports to be a microcosm describing all possible pathways of change, and their incessant changing relationships in the greater macrocosm of the universe.
Please note: The content and/or format of this post may not be in finalized form. Reblog as a TEXT post will contain this caveat alerting readers to refer to the current version in the source blog. A LINK post will itself do the same. :)
Scroll to bottom for links to Previous / Next pages (if existent). This blog builds on what came before so the best way to follow it is chronologically. Tumblr doesn’t make that easy to do. Since the most recent page is reckoned as Page 1 the number of the actual Page 1 continually changes as new posts are added. To determine the number currently needed to locate Page 1 go to the most recent post which is here. The current total number of pages in the blog will be found at the bottom. The true Page 1 can be reached by changing the web address mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com to mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/x, exchanging my current page number for x and entering. To find a different true page(p) subtract p from x+1 to get the number(n) to use. Place n in the URL instead of x (mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/n) where n = x + 1 - p. :)
Did We Just Find The Largest Rotating ‘Thing’ In The Universe?
“Why are they rotating, however? Is it something that can truly be explained by tidal torques and nothing else? The early evidence points to “yes,” as the presence of large masses near the filaments — what cosmologists identify as “haloes” — seems to intensify the rotation. As the authors note, “the more massive the haloes that sit at either end of the filaments, the more rotation is detected,” consistent with gravitational torques inducing these motions. Nevertheless, more study is needed, as temperature and other physics may also play a role.
The big breakthrough is that we’ve finally detected rotation on these unprecedentedly large scales. If all goes well, we’ll not only figure out why, but we’ll be able to predict how quickly each filament that we see ought to be spinning, and for what reason. Until we can predict how every structure in the Universe forms, behaves, and evolves, theoretical astrophysicists will never run out of work to do.”
We know that on small scales, everything rotates. We know that on the scale of the entire observable Universe, there’s no rotation to be seen. Well, what are the largest structures, then, that do rotate? Galaxies? Galaxy clusters? Something even bigger? Yes, something bigger!
Did The Largest Galaxy Survey Ever Just Challenge Cosmology As We Know It?
“If you want to get headlines, eyeballs, and attention, just say those three magic words, “Einstein was wrong.” You won’t be right, of course; no one has been thus far. Relativity, both the special and general forms, have passed every test we’ve thrown at them for more than a century, and scientists have arguably tried harder to prove Einstein wrong than any other scientist in history. Now, within the framework of General Relativity and in the face of the largest galaxy survey ever, we’re going to claim “Einstein was wrong” instead of looking at the far more likely possibility: that we haven’t handled this unprecedented deluge of data properly in the one instance where a small but significant discrepancy manifests itself?
The truth is we have an enormous new set of valuable data, and we can extract a fantastic amount of information about the Universe from it. The nature and amount of dark matter and dark energy have been confirmed; the Universe’s expansion rate lines up with precisely what previous studies have said; and the clustering amplitude is slightly smaller than we expected it would be. It’s doubtful, however, that this is a sign of new physics; if anything, it’s an issue to investigate further and cross-check with other galaxy surveys. If it turns out to be something that’s actually worth a second look, more and better data will show us the way.”
Ask Ethan: Could Our Universe Have Collided With Another, Revealing The Multiverse?
“I remember reading your article about how universes can’t collide due to the theory of cosmic inflation. Then I remember reading somewhere else about how another bubble universe could be created too close to another bubble universe and that could cause a collision. Any thoughts on this, would really like your opinion.”
According to the theory of cosmic inflation, there was a phase of the Universe that preceded the Big Bang. During this phase, there was no matter or radiation permeating the Universe, but rather energy inherent to space itself, causing the energy density of the Universe to remain constant to causing space to expand at a relentless, rapid, exponential rate. When inflation came to an end where we are, the hot Big Bang, and the birth of our Universe as we know it, occurred.
Ask Ethan: Will The End Of Our Universe Give Rise To A New One?
“When our universe ends, will a new universe start in all the new empty space?”
Here’s a head-scratcher for you. In the far future, after countless aeons where dark energy dominates, our Universe will be cold, empty, enormous, and yet will have a non-zero amount of energy inherent to space. When our Universe began with a hot Big Bang, it arose from a prior inflationary state that was empty, enormous, expanding, and had a non-zero (and large) amount of energy inherent to space.
Why Isn’t Anyone Seriously Challenging The Big Bang?
“So what happened over the past few decades, that all of the major challenges to the Big Bang have fallen away? Two major events: the collection of large suites of high-quality data, which validated the Big Bang’s major predictions to incredibly high precision, and the fact that the main advocates of the alternatives — once they no longer became defensible on their own merits — got old and died.
If any scientifically viable alternatives to the Big Bang ever arise, almost every modern cosmologist would thoroughly welcome it, and then immediately put it to the test. The problem is that every such alternative is already ruled out by the evidence in hand. Until an idea arises that meets those necessary criteria, the Big Bang will stand alone as the only idea compatible with the full suite of data we now possess.”
Today, there are no serious scientific alternatives to the Big Bang. Many people, dissatisfied with this, have derided the status quo. But the truth is that you have to align with our observed and measured data, and no alternative to the Big Bang will do.
The Largest Structures In The Universe May Not Actually Exist
“Those imperfections then evolved gravitationally, limited by our physical laws. Tremendous cosmological structures formed: stars, galaxies, and the great cosmic web. We expect a structural size limit: ~1.2 billion light-years. Anything larger wouldn’t have sufficient time to form.”
When we look at the enormous cosmic web: the ways galaxies group and cluster together throughout the Universe, as well as the voids left between the structures, there’s general agreement between the observed maximum size of these structures and the theoretical limiting size we expect.
A sensitive microwave telescope at the South Pole announced the discovery of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation recently, which is the observable afterglow of the Big Bang.
Although the invisible substance known as dark matter dominates galaxies nowadays, it was apparently only a minor ingredient of galaxies in the early universe, a new study finds.
This new finding sheds light on how galaxies and their mysterious “haloes” of dark matter have changed over time, researchers said.
A controversial new gravity hypothesis has passed its first test
Einstein might have been wrong.
By Fiona MacDonald
A controversial new hypothesis that suggests our understanding of gravity is wrong has just passed an important first test.
First proposed back in 2010, the new hypothesis states that gravity might behave and arise very differently than Einstein predicted, and an independent study of more than 30,000 galaxies has now found the first evidence to back this up.
“My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.”
I have been so out of it that I didn’t realize it was my idol #StephenHawking ‘s birthday today… Luckily I met up with someone else who admires him and his work who inadvertently reminded me. Happy Birthday Stephen, this is the first year your birthday is celebrated without your wit and physical presence… I will never forget you, you will never be forgotten,
Gravitational waves, produced when behemoths like black holesandneutron stars spiral inward and merge, have been spotted 50 times (each event represented with a large circle above). Nadieh Bremer- Visual Cinnamon
Free yourself from cosmological tyranny! Everything started in a Big Bang? Invisible dark matter? Black holes? Why accept such a weird cosmos? For all those who wonder about this bizarre universe, and those who want to overthrow the Big Bang, this handbook gives you ‘just the facts’: the observations that have shaped these ideas and theories. […]
