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How to Picture a Blackhole
This month, researchers are inaugurating the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that will try to take the first detailed pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
This observation would be a remarkable achievement, underscoring the progress that has been made in black-hole research in just the last few decades. As recently as the 1970s, astronomers still argued over whether black holes were theoretical constructs or real physical objects. They now have ample evidence that black holes are not only real, but abundant in the cosmos.
Here on Earth, advanced computer simulations have given astronomers a wealth of information, leading theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech to suggest that black-hole research is entering a new golden age.
“There is now a program of observations that I expect will bring us some big surprises and hopefully validate the predictions from these simulations,” he said.
Yet it’s still strange to imagine what the area around a black hole looks like. After all, a black hole is an object from which nothing, including light, can escape.
In the following gallery, Wired looks at some of the predictions that researchers have made about viewing a black hole.

How to Picture a Blackhole

This month, researchers are inaugurating the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that will try to take the first detailed pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This observation would be a remarkable achievement, underscoring the progress that has been made in black-hole research in just the last few decades. As recently as the 1970s, astronomers still argued over whether black holes were theoretical constructs or real physical objects. They now have ample evidence that black holes are not only real, but abundant in the cosmos.

Here on Earth, advanced computer simulations have given astronomers a wealth of information, leading theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech to suggest that black-hole research is entering a new golden age.

“There is now a program of observations that I expect will bring us some big surprises and hopefully validate the predictions from these simulations,” he said.

Yet it’s still strange to imagine what the area around a black hole looks like. After all, a black hole is an object from which nothing, including light, can escape.

In the following gallery, Wired looks at some of the predictions that researchers have made about viewing a black hole.

Caenorhabditis elegans

scipsy:

Basking Shark (Cetorhinus maximus) (via Australian Geographic)

scipsy:

In this photoset you can see the stunning new image of the Eagle Nebula (a composite of the Herschel in far-infrared and XMM-Newton’s X-ray images), the same region in x-ray only, and a gif zooming in the center of the nebula showing the “Pillar of Creation”. (via ESO)

(Source: ForGIFs.com)

laviencheddar:

TGIF: Fotografiando a la Estación Espacial Internacional y la Luna desde un parking

cwnl:

Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory

I think It’s time people started embracing evolution as a fact. An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.

Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions, it could help reveal the principles guiding them.

“This is actually simple. It doesn’t need mystical complexity or a lot of the things that people have hypothesized — special genes, a huge genome, very unnatural conditions,” said evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, co-author of a study Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

nationalpost:

Big Bang camera goes dark

On Saturday, 1.5-million kilometres from Earth, a tank of liquid helium coolant went dry. Thus ended the working life of the Planck Surveyor, a European satellite that took the most expensive single picture in history

biocanvas:

A 630-times view of a cell infected with poxvirus, a virus from the same family as smallpox and monkeypox.

Image by Daniel Kalman, et al., Emory Univeristy.

discoverynews:

Astronomers Aim To Take First Picture of Black Hole

Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers this week will attempt to do just that.

What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the rim of the black hole just before it falls into the abyss.

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