Skip to main content

A Beautiful Physics Doubt

"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect"

 By Samuel Johnson 

 One of the curious doubts asked by a physics lover on "The Grand Old Universe" was :-

'Why it was difficult to get a picture of black hole earlier? What are the changes in technology that made it possible?' 



I, The Physics Expert will crear that doubt in this post

The answer is :-
The work that allowed this photo to be taken has been going on for decades. It meant overcoming difficulties that have seemed impossible.
The central difficulty with trying to get pictures of black holes is given away in their name: they are black because they have such a strong gravitational pull that light falls into them and can’t escape. As such, it can’t get to here and we can’t take a photograph of it.
To get through all of that difficulty, astronomers had to work to join eight different dishes up into one huge virtual telescope, allowing them to work together and see further than they would individually. That happened in April 2017 – scientists have been working to pick through the results in the years since.
They were synchronised together using a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry or VLBI. It allowed the astronomers to achieve a level of angular resolution equivalent to reading a newspaper in New York from a pavement cafe in Paris.
Even then, the details were sketchy: they had to look through all the data received to ensure that they were seeing what they thought they were. That required complex analysis of the data using algorithms as well as scientific understanding, to allow them to fill in the gaps in the grainy and unclear images and produce the one that flew around the world on Wednesday.
The person behind all of this is Katie Bouman

Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made it possible 'to join eight different dishes up into one huge virtual telescope, allowing them to work together and see further than they would individually'

This also proved Einstein's General theory of Relativity.
I hope you have got your answer
If you have any other doubts please feel free to ask me
Your Physics Expert Signing Off
Khushil


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God Doesn't Play Dice

Hello Guys and welcome back to my blog !!! Today we are going to talk about a huge controversy on Science during 1920s...   Albert Einstein   is one of the greatest and certainly best known physicists. If you ask anyone to name a physicist the most common answer you will receive is “Einstein”. Einstein is also famous for his quotations. Among the many Einstein’s quotations one is particularly popular among the general public: “God does not play dice”. But what did Einstein mean by this? The quotation says, “Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe.” It was addressed by Einstein to Max Born (one of the fathers of Quantum Mechanics) in a letter that he wrote to Born in 1926. The “Old one” and “He” Einstein refers to is God. The fame of this quotation stems from two sources: 1) Einstein’s disagreement with the fundamental concept of Quan...
4 comments
Read more

Antimatter - The Long Lost Cousin of Matter

A beautiful quote by Paul Dirac Many of you physics lovers would have figured out what I am gonna talk about Yes, The contrary to matter - Antimattter So now let's have a brief insight about it Antimatter: Classical physics only allowed systems to have positive energy. But Dirac’s new theory of relativistic quantum mechanics allowed for a particle with negative energy solution, as a counterpart to the familiar positive-energy electron. After ruling out the possibility that this particle was simply the proton – which has a hugely greater mass – Dirac predicted the existence of a new particle with the same mass of the electron but with a charge that was positive rather than negative. It’s now understood that all particles have an equivalent antimatter particle with opposite charge and quantum spin – although some are their own antiparticle. However hardly any antimatter is seen in the observable universe, and why there should be vastly much more normal ma...
5 comments
Read more

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Saul Perlmutter Fritz Zwicky Hello guys   and welcome back to my blog!! Today we are goimg to talk about Dark matter and Dark Energy Both of which are decisive to the future of the universe In the early 1990s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the universe had to slow. The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been acc...
2 comments
Read more