3/2/2023 0 Comments Black hole movie![]() So I think there is something arresting about the image beyond its technical achievement.” Another said the image on the cellphone was captivating for hours – just walking around staring at this image before it was released. “One colleague said she looked at it and she felt terrified of it. We’d seen simulations of this thing for years so it wasn’t a matter of not having any idea what it would look like, but seeing an actual black hole was something different. He adds: “The scientists were not divorced from broader cultural philosophical meanings. Malcolm Perry, Andrew Strominger and Stephen Hawking in Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know. Even if you know there are black holes – from the equations or from more indirect observations – to actually look at it and say, ‘ There is a black hole,’ I think was thrilling for the public and thrilling for the scientists involved.” Galison, himself a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, recalls: “It resonated for people because it did seem to recalibrate our relationship with the world. The effort produced spectacular results two years ago by capturing the first ever image of a black hole, displayed on newspaper front pages around the world and now printed in large format at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That being impractical, the next best thing is the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an array of eight radio observatories on six mountains spanning four continents, acting together like shards of a single mirror. The black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as Messier 87 is so far away that it would ideally require a telescope the size of Earth. We use the visible things that are near a black hole to deduce things about the black hole itself.” So what you’re seeing is a kind of shadow of the black hole and by looking at this glowing ring around the black hole, we can deduce a lot about its size and its properties. ![]() ![]() “But the first good news in the effort is that these black holes accrete gas and matter, stuff that flows around it and gets heated up in that swirl to a temperature of roughly 10bn degrees, and that glows. The one we’re looking at is 55m light years away so its imprint on the sky, so to speak, is like trying to read the date on a coin in London from New York. “Black holes are the hardest to see objects in the universe because they reflect no light, they emit no light. “I think that I’m perversely drawn to topics of invisible things,” he says cheerfully, noting that his previous films include national security secrecy and the need to bury nuclear waste. But television is an insatiable visual medium so Galison – Pellegrino University professor of the history of science and physics at Harvard – had an unenviable task in making a film about “something that struggles with all of its might to be unseen”, as one of his interviewees puts it. They are a source of fascination for astrophysicists, mathematicians and philosophers and a ready-made metaphor for artists. ![]() Given that there are 100bn galaxies in the visible universe, there are probably 100bn supermassive black holes. Supermassive black holes – millions or billions of times bigger than our sun – are found at the centre of almost every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way. Once you are over the edge, there’s no way back.”Ĭity-sized black holes form when certain stars run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity. It’s a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. It is Hawking’s voice, that instantly recognisable computer speech synthesiser, that opens the film: “A black hole is stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. Among the highlights is being a fly on the wall as the late Stephen Hawking tries to figure them out. We are talking about his documentary film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, four years in the making and available on Netflix from 1 June, which follows two scientific collaborations to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. ![]() Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: “In the long term that’s not a good survival event.” “Physicists have an expression called ‘spaghettification’ because if you were falling in feet first, your feet would be more attracted towards the centre than your head, and your sides would be pushed towards your middle and this process would extend and compress you.” ![]()
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