First ever photograph of a "Black Hole" revealed today

Ovid_and_Flem said:

Appleseed said:

First photo of a black hole for sale on Craigslist. 

Link?

https://chicago.craigslist.org/nwi/cto/d/demotte-1996-eclipse-rs-5spd-not-running/6844863216.html

In reply to Appleseed :

LMAO

It crushes pistons into nothingness with immense amounts of boost and radiates conrods

Here is Katie Bauman posing with the 5 petabytes of data used to capture the picture of the black hole. She came up with the idea of using an array of radio telescopes to take a picture and did a lot of work towards making this possible. 

Here's to women in science getting credit for their work.

^Looks like 64 drives, so each one is ~80TB!?!?

Turns out there are SSDs with that kind of capacity, they cost over $10k EACH

The fastest way to move the data was to put it on planes.  Internet transfer would have taken much, much longer.  That's a lot of data!

You know what they say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...

In the mid-2000s I heard of a Taiwanese TV station that used dudes on sportbikes carrying hard drives to move data around quickly.

Just ran across this, turns out that what you see in the pic is just half the drives for a single location. There were 128 drives for each telescope, 1,024 total, fairly pedestrian 8TB helium-filled HDDs that cost a few hundred each. Interestingly the reason they chose the helium-filled drives is that they had problems with regular hard drives running in the lower pressures at high altitude:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/12/heliumfilled_disk_drives_stored_black_hole_data/

In reply to Brett_Murphy :

I can't imagine processing that kind of data.  Heck of an achievement.  

Makes me feel small that I complain about files in the 300GB range.

Brett_Murphy said:

Here is Katie Bauman posing with the 5 petabytes of data used to capture the picture of the black hole. She came up with the idea of using an array of radio telescopes to take a picture and did a lot of work towards making this possible. 

Here's to women in science getting credit for their work.

So on my Youtube recommendations- her TED talk comes up- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs

I sort of understand what she's talking about- but to be able to put that into code, process petabytes of data, and confidently get the image they got- without the image bias they are worried about- is even way more impressive than just the volume of data.  This is the actual "enhance image" that you see in movies.  Amazing.