Name: 【TED】Sheperd Doeleman: Inside the black hole image that made history (Inside the black hole image that made history | Sheperd Doeleman)
Uploaded: 2019-05-10T14:09:28.000Z
Duration: 11 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Chris Anderson: Shep, thank you so much for coming.

Adverbs of manner

I think your plane landed literally two hours ago in Vancouver.

So, talk us through how do you get from Einstein's equation to a black hole?

Einstein came up with this geometric theory of gravity

and then space-time tells matter in turn how to move around it.

And you can get enough matter into a small enough region

the force of gravity keeps even light inside.

CA: And so, before that, the reason the Earth moves around the Sun

is not because the Sun is pulling the Earth as we think,

but it's literally changed the shape of space

so that we just sort of fall around the Sun.

tells the Earth how to move around the Sun.

You're almost seeing a black hole puncture through space-time,

then there's a point at which light orbits the black hole.

CA: And so that's, I guess, is what's happening here.

this is a computer simulation of what we always thought,

like, the event horizon around the black hole.

SD: Until last week, we had no idea what a black hole really looked like.

The best we could do were simulations like this in supercomputers,

but even here you see this ring of light,

That's where photons literally move around the black hole,

and around that is this hot gas that's drawn to the black hole,

All this gas is trying to get into a very small volume, so it heats up.

CA: A few years ago, you embarked on this mission

to try and actually image one of these things.

you focused on this galaxy way out there.

we're going to zoom into the galaxy M87, it's 55 million light-years away.

there's a six-and-a-half-billion- solar-mass black hole.

That's hard for us to really fathom, right?

Six and a half billion suns compressed into a single point.

And it's governing some of the energetics of the center of this galaxy.

CA: But even though that thing is so huge, because it's so far away,

to actually dream of getting an image of it,

The resolution would be incredible that you need.

SD: Black holes are the smallest objects in the known universe.

But they have these outsize effects on whole galaxies.

you would need to build a telescope as large as the Earth,

because the black hole that we're looking at

is we used telescopes all around the world,

we synchronized them perfectly with atomic clocks,

so they received the light waves from this black hole,

and then we stitched all of that data together to make an image.

in all of those locations at the same time,

SD: We had to get lucky in a lot of different ways.

And sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good.

In this case, we were both, I like to think.

But light had to come from the black hole.

It had to come through intergalactic space,

through the Earth's atmosphere, where water vapor can absorb it,

the size of the Earth at that wavelength of light,

was just right to resolve that black hole, 55 million light-years away.

CA: So you started capturing huge amounts of data.

I think this is like half the data from just one telescope.

SD: Yeah, this is one of the members of our team, Lindy Blackburn,

recorded at the Large Millimeter Telescope,

which is atop a 15,000-foot mountain in Mexico.

And what he's holding there is about half a petabyte.

Which, to put it in terms that we might understand,

it's about 5,000 people's lifetime selfie budget.

So this was all shipped, you couldn't send this over the internet.

and the massive computer effort began to try and analyze it.

what you were going to see coming out of this.

SD: The way this technique works that we used --

imagine taking an optical mirror and smashing it

and putting all the shards in different places.

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【TED】Sheperd Doeleman: Inside the black hole image that made history (Inside the black hole image that made history | Sheperd Doeleman)

literally

entire

massive

technique