Smart move by Veritasium, making a video commenting the news just before the news actually happens. Time works in weird ways around black holes.
Anyways, it is a good one. So is that channel in general.
It is also a good video if you just watched Interstellar, because it also explains why the black hole looks the way it does in the movie. Note that the movie black hole rendering is slightly incorrect for artistic reasons, the video shows the more scientifically accurate version.
As far as I know, Veritasium and others occasionally join efforts and coordinate around soon to be published scientific discoveries in a goal to increase exposure. Don’t know if this was the case with the black hole image.
"The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration observed the supermassive black holes at the center of M87 and our Milky Way galaxy (SgrA*) finding the dark central shadow in accordance with General Relativity, further demonstrating the power of this 100 year-old theory."
But in the press conference they specifically said they weren’t releasing SgrA* yes because they hadn’t completed their analysis. They released pictures after that?
It's too bad we cannot see the accretion disk edge-on as in the video. That would have made it a perfect prediction. Maybe it's so thin that it's overwhelmed by the projections of the top and bottom of the back side of the disk.
Given the observation period has been multiple years, does that virtual size include the orbit of the Earth? Or is there something that limits it to still being Earth-sized?
A guy on Reddit actually asked this in the AMA. While that would increase the resolution, it would also be extremely difficult. The algorithms used to combine the data from the dishes relies on the exact position of the dish being known at the time of measuring, to a precision of fractions of millimeters. It's already hard to do on the earth's surface, but imagine doing it with a sattelite zipping around the earth at 20K km/s, or the moon at >1 km/s around the earth, or Mars at 24K km/s around the sun.
Not to mention getting the data back down here. For the analysis of M87, there were multiple petabytes generated: they had to use good old sneakernet and ship hard drives.
Anyways, it is a good one. So is that channel in general.
It is also a good video if you just watched Interstellar, because it also explains why the black hole looks the way it does in the movie. Note that the movie black hole rendering is slightly incorrect for artistic reasons, the video shows the more scientifically accurate version.