 |
| Not that they'll be missed. |
We're talking, of course, about the mainstream news media - with whom we want nothing to do today. The Dems interrogating Barr, the Dems trying to get Trump's tax returns, top level turnover in various White House departments as our southern border fails, Alec Baldwin talking about running for President - oh, please!
But we do find it at least potentially interesting that a group of astronomers is promising today to reveal the first ever direct image of an actual black hole in space. Granted, we don't expect it to look like much of anything...but its shape could at least potentially change everything we think we know about physics and what we believe to be reality. Or...and we can't emphasize this strongly enough... it might just look like a boring hole.
Because seriously, how hard would it be to fake a photo of absolute nothingness in deep space? You could sneeze on the film of an old chest X-ray and probably pass off the results as the greatest astronomical discovery since the days of Copernicus (who invented the sneeze). Although actually, there could and should be some interesting stuff to see around the black hole, swirling down the ultimate drain and giving off wild bursts of light and energy as time, matter, and space are all condensed into infinitely hot meaninglessness.
Granted, Washington DC had already given us a pretty good idea of what a black hole looks like...
 |
| Nothing that goes in is ever seen again. |
 |
| True fact: the Event Horizon is defined by sparkling, iridescent drips of sugar glaze. |
PULSE-POUNDING UPDATE:
Tah-dah!!!! Okay, not that great a picture, but still genuinely interesting.
37 comments:
Wasn’t there a politician a few years back who said that the term “black hole” was racist?
At least I saw some fun stuff today ---
Candace Owens slapping around Ted Lieu-ser for his misrepresentations of her Hitler comments, along with her slapping Jerry the Nads regarding who was calling whom stupid.
On the international scene, a giant Trump banner displayed by an audience member as Netanyahu was addressing his supporters as the election results were coming in.
Imagine the shock and awe as NASA unveils a photo of Oprah in a black Speedo standing on 42nd St. flagging down sailors offering to "shiver their timbers".......
Where our votes go after election day ??? ........
A cultural black hole is an undiscussable core belief of such intense gravity that it transcends or distorts any other beliefs, values, or set of principles that enter inside the spherical boundary of its gravitational field and absorbs, indeed swallows up, the precepts held by the “victim.”
Sound familiar?
If there wasn't, there will be now!
How many black holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?
Hmmm, Black Hole. Sounds like my dating efforts in high school.
@Flyboy- It's entirely possible. Of course, if Maxine Waters was mentioned in the same sentence, they might have a valid point.
@Dan- I really like Candace Owens and the courageous work she's doing. It was good to see her standing strong against Lieu and Nadler, both of whom are appalling creeps.
@Regnad Kcin- Yeah, it was only a matter of time before we "went there." (grin)
@REM1875- Your comment "where our votes go after election day" is especially resonant as state after state joins a pact to automatically give their electoral votes to whomever wins the popular vote. Remember "checks and balances?" Remember being warned that we have "a Republic, if you can keep it?" Those institutions are under serious fire.
@Brie Camembert- Dang, I wish I'd taken YOUR approach to discussing "cultural black holes" today. That's a great, accurate, funny, and fairly terrifying comparison.
@PaBlum- I wish I could respond to that with a single, dramatic piano chord.
@Fred Ciampi- So you were interested in studying heavenly bodies?
Shouldn't that be #BlackHolesAntimatter ? :)
Space is above my intellectual pay grade. I have never understood black holes or an expanding universe. I just cannot get my mind around how those things work so I will be earth bound a bit longer. Now, I can get my head around the ignorance of planting flags on Mars and taking a picture, the dark side of the moon and aliens. I saw a thing on planet sizes and one was so large, the earth was not even a dot on it. But, I digress as Occasional Colored will certainly enlighten me on my ignorance.
As an amateur Astronomer and who also follows particle physics
I was looking forward to this reveal
until I started seeing the MSM pushing it like it was the second coming of
obama his royal highness himself.
Kind of put me right off the mood.
But I hope the show lives up to at least half the hype.
My prediction?
Within two days they will find a way to tie
Global Warming/Climate Change into this event...
MSG Grumpy
We are wasting so much money and time looking in space for black holes when we could look here:
The mainstream media is a black hole where truth goes to die.
The democrats are the ones who are the black hole sucking capitalism and our nation into the oblivion of socialism.
The islamic religion is where freedom and tolerance disappears.
Lastly, the deep state is where tax dollars disappear with frightening regularity and at an increasing rate.
You were pretty much right about the black hole picture:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough
Word Salad for you readers:
Black Holes, backhoes, crack ho's, wackos.
Makes as much sense as the Dumbocratic Party, dunnit?!?
Free Association! Because Associations need to be Free!!
I'll go back to my corner now...
@MSG Grumpy (and I'm pretty sure the MSG does not mean "monosodium glutamate"!): They won't blame global warming/climate change on the black hole. No profit in that. But mark my words: they are busily working on finding a way to classify them as "anthropomorphic" black holes so that we sheep can be properly and thoroughly fleeced...
My imaginings were better (and in better focus) than that picture. All that money for all those fancy telescopes, right down the DC hole...
Alec Baldwin is running? Oh, please let that be true! I caught a snippet of an interview with him last week where in about 20 seconds he insulted roughly 4/5ths of the country, or largely everyone who lives outside of his social bubble in Santa Monica and Manhattan. If you think that Hillary's "deplorables" strategy was her one strong point, then he's your candidate.
The Black Hole: Actually, to be accurate this morning's revelation of the first picture of a black hole revealed that absolutely nothing has changed about everything we think we know about physics and what we believe to be reality since 1905 when Albert Einstein working for the government became so galactically bored that the only way that he could retain sanity while doing such mind-numbing work was to daydream his theory of relativity and eventually describe the black hole that we finally saw this morning 114 years later.
Actually what we saw wasn't the black hole itself, but the evidence of its existence. You can't actually see a black hole because there literally isn't anything to see as light itself cannot escape from it. Much like we can't see what happens to most of our dollars that gets sucked up by government, or what was gained by AOC's expenditure of over $300,000 on a college education. We only get to see the "event horizon", which suggests that there is something there. But any hope of seeing where our dollars actually go is forlorn.
My my, I would have imagined it to have been more spherical rather than a toroid lying at a convenient plane for our photography.
Does this particular black hole owe back taxes to the irs?
Asking for a friend.
@Dan, Candace Owens provided a model for how conservatives should be responding when pulled before these phony and insipid virtue signalling sessions that aren't really intended reveal anything relevant or new, but only exist to degrade and humiliate people the left disagrees with.
It looks as though Netanyahu and Likud walked away in a victory that most of the Progressive media declared "too close to call". (I had to scroll down some distance in my news feed to find this, as Google thought that numerous stories saying the same thing regarding the since dead Mueller report were much more relevant) His victory is hardly a surprise, considering that ordinary people tend to be far more concerned about things like Hamas rockets falling on their neighborhoods than opening borders or global warming.
@Brie Camembert's description is apt.
The Black Hole: The thing I found most interesting wasn't the picture itself, but what it took to get it. Petabytes of data (more that what would be required to document all Clinton crimes) collected from numerous radio telescopes from around the planet was so dense that it was faster to fly the hard drives to a central location to be analysed that it would have been to send over the Internet. Amazing.
Not to be gross, but being in the medical profession, it looks like a colonoscopy.
But what is all that black surrounding the donut of light with a black center?
I don't get it. Or care, for that matter.
@Stilton,
Again, you owe me an apology! I am sooOOoo offended! Where is the photo of a white hole?
On a serious note, The Candace Owens thing was priceless! Huzzah for her to have the courage to stand up to those turds and point out how pathetic they are. She has more "nads" than Nadler; that piece of lizard crap wasn't even listening to her.
Let's assume that's an image from far out along a Z axis (in front of it) and we're looking at a projection of the X & Y axis. Let's move to the other two axis; or let it rotate the correct azimuths & amounts.. lets sww if it still appears the same.
I'm OK with the very dense center etc .... but in space? Would it not have to be symmetrical in all dimensions? That's what I've figured had be screwy about the artists and Sci-Fi renditions appearing as suck-hole "whirlpools" for example; with just one face.
I thought my taxes, plus lottery and Indian Casino income was supposed to get rid of those black holes, yet I drive through them every day. Wait....maybe I'm not on topic.
P.S. Candace Owens rocks! She has my vote for any office she runs for, including President when she is old enough.
All this time I thought a black hole was Oinkra's hoo-ha!
I once read that she was questioned by TSA agents for several
hours when they found out she had 100 pounds of crack up her dress.
Another cartoon idea- Joe Biden hawking "Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific" shampoo. Yes it is back on the market again!
@M. Mitchell Marmel- Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
@james daily- The things you mention are all pretty baffling. But if I were ever to unload my personal theories about the nature of our Quantum Universe, people here would be running for the exits. Spoiler alert: everything is a lot weirder than you think it is.
@MSG Grumpy- The final image doesn't have enough eye candy to engage the great unwashed, but it's pretty frickin' cool in my book. Frankly, I was expecting an image with much less definition. And you're right that this will likely be linked to climate change soon.
@Glenda T Goode- Try as I might, I can find no errors in your deductions.
@Velveeta Processed Cheese Food - All by itself, the picture isn't that amazing visually. But when you think about what it is, then it's actually a mindblower.
@Igor- Still, I like your enthusiasm!
@Emmentaler Limburger- Compared to MOST of the crap government money goes into, I don't mind whatever investment went into this picture. Because the picture itself isn't really the point: it's the accumulation of all the data that went into creating that image. We'll hopefully learn a lot from this.
@John the Econ- Baldwin is an idiot and an asshole. I'd like to see him run just for the pleasure of him being destroyed. Regarding the black hole, you're right that it hasn't changed what Einstein predicted...but that's still no small thing. If it had been some other weird shape, a lot of mathematicians and physicists would be heading back to the drawing boards today.
@KanB- As I understand it (and heaven knows I don't), I believe that the toroid appearance is what you'd see from ANY angle - not just our perspective. Which is weird...but that's also sort of the point.
@Sortahwitte- Oh great, now we have to name it after Sharpton...
@John the Econ- I love what Candace Owens is doing. That young lady kicks ass. And yes, I find the backstory on collecting the data for the black hole image just fascinating. I like the fact that people are still doing such ambitious things.
@JJ- I sort of thought the same thing. Although if we find out that their are polyps inside the event horizon, the universe is going to seem a lot grosser.
@Judi King- The "black center" contains the black hole - but it's impossible to see because no light can escape its gravitational pull. The light ring around the (invisible) black hole is all sorts of cosmic material being sucked in, spun, and tortured on the way to some kind of oblivion we can't even imagine. And it's care-worthy (is that even barely a word?) because it gives us a lot of information about how the universe works.
@Colby Muenster- I was going to post a picture of a white hole just for you, but I was afraid that if I did a Google image search for "Polar Bear Butts" that the authorities might come to my door.
@Rod- If I understand (and again, the odds are almost 100% against it), it would be symmetrical in all dimensions and thus look like more of a sphere than a whirlpool, except for the fact that it looks like a torus from every direction owing to something that Stephen Hawking mentioned to me one night when we were drinking, and now I've forgotten.
@Geoff King- If pot can be made illegal, why can't potholes be made illegal?! This, too, was a topic of drunken conversation between Dr. Hawking and myself. Then again, it might have been my Amazon Echo. Those electronic voices get confusing. And regarding Candace Owens, I hope she has a great future ahead. Real improvements in our country's racial dynamics are going to have to come from passionate, conservative, black Americans.
@Leonard Jones- Easy on the word "hoo-ha." This is a family-friendly blog (grin).
Candice rocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zWrYQImBko
I'll be facetious but that black hole looks like what a Proctogolist would see in a prison. Now, our esteemed Chairperson of the banking committee didn't know the govt took over student loans in 2010. Her ignorance knows no bounds and I always thought Sheila Jackson-Lee was the most ignorant but Occasionally Black is quickly gaining.
The reason the 'sphere' "appears" to be a toroid from all directions is pretty east to explain - if you imagine a basket ball covered in dust (or motes of light, or butterflies, or...) then delete the ball allowing the specks to fall. At the edge of the mess, you have a layer one speck thick, representing the perimeter (or equator, if you will). At the center, it will be two specks thick, one each for the north and south poles. As one moves from edge to center (or center to edge) the density increases as you are catching more of the (collapsed) surface. Max density would probably be ~60% of radius, but that's just a guess.
And any direction you're viewing it from will 'collapse it from above' so it always appears t be a ring / torus...
At least you guys w/ the Ophra / Orca jokes didn't bring up Whoopie the Cushion...
For a White Hole, you can check for a PR pic of Alec Baldwin, or pretty much anyone else in Hollyweird. See also Mike Moore, Spicolli, etc...
Looks suspiciously like my recent colonoscopy...
@Pete (Detroit),
The people you mention DO have nicknames with the word "hole" in them, but usually preceded by some other word than "white."
Since the speed of light is about 686,000 mph and the aledged black hole is 55,000 light years away, uh, just a minute, I'm trying to work out the math of how we got that picture......
Missed a few numbers in your 686,000 mph.
Actual speed is 670,616,629.384 mph.
Now that is really hauling ass.
Maybe the math will work out better with this bigger number.
Heltau
Actually it's miles per second, not hour.
Post a Comment