A good day to watch black hole movies.
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Not this one.
Seriously just don’t.
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Oh, it’s not that bad.
Though it is pretty bad.
But yeah, don’t watch that one, even though I still love it.
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Oh, I so hate that. Somewhere along the way when I wasn’t paying attention, Scientific American switched to publishing stories written by science writers instead of scientists. That prose can get pretty purple (as in oxygen-deprived) too. I want to be awed about the science, not the fancy language that garbles the message.
And I swear, if anyone uses “orb” to refer to a star again, I will scream.
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As the explainer video mentions, but it’s really cool so it’s worth repeating anyway, you’d see the ring dead-on no matter how the ring was oriented to you, because of the way light wraps around the black hole.
Or, at least, you’d see a ring dead-on. It sounds like you could also see the same ring at an angle, if it were at an angle. I’m not sure if the reason we only see the one is because of how it lines up.
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This is so fucking cool.
I disagree. Fond memories from my childhood. Watch it. With your robot friends.
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Holy crap. I didn’t realize the scale of that.
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It’s not a coincidence though; they picked the m87 galaxy, and its huge, visible cosmic black hole fart jet is perpendicular to the line between it and the Earth, which means we’re more or less in the same plane as the black hole’s accretion disk
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Kudos to Jim Campbell for asking the question. I am surprised someone didn’t reply “yep, well, they move the telescope, duh”. Which is true but only a tiny bit of the story.
Double kudos to Nixiebunny for answering it. This is the sort of thing the press releases ought to mention instead of that “looking into the void” “Eye of Sauron” stuff. Quite a thing, indeed.
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I was first exposed to it when I was too young to resist its charms. Ok, script needs major work, but I still enjoy the atmosphere, score, and general look of the film. And it features Roddy McDowell (one of the axioms of cinema).
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Have a drink every time Max appears and it will be quite enjoyable.
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I saw a few episodes of this when pretty young, and assumed it was some sort of sequel:
"John Blackstar, astronaut, is swept through a black hole, into an ancient alien universe. "
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BBBBBBBBBB!
BBBBBBBBBB!!
BBBBBBBBBB!!!
Wer A sagt muß auch B sagen.
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The opposite is true, really. We’re a lot closer to being in the same plan as the pole of M87’s black hole, rather than its equator. Absent relativistic effects, the accretion disk itself would appear as a ring from our point of view, rather than a line. The jet we can see may look like it’s perpendicular to us, but that’s only because it’s a few thousand light years long (!!!) and not perfectly facing us. It’s a bit like looking at a very long train on the horizon from a slight angle; it may still look like it’s traveling straight at a 90 degree angle from us, but that’s just a trick of the perspective. One of the giveaways is the fact that we can’t see the jet being blown out in the opposite direction (and because of more Physics Reasons, there are always two jets). The other jet is moving away from us so fast that the light from it is actually being dimmed by the speed of its motion in much the same way that one side of the black hole’s accretion disk looks dimmer because it’s the half that’s moving away from us as it rotates. It’s moving so fast, in fact, that it’s been rendered essentially invisible.
(Lest y’all start thinking of me as a brilliant astronomer, this is covered in Veritasium’s two videos 
)
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Either Max?
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Here’s a supermassive black hole from which no truth nor benediction can escape:
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