Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE <comment><USER2> Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1].

TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

<comment><USER3> Wow, the video you posted is even more informative and clear than the actual press conference, and it was created by someone who hadn't even seen the image yet based purely on the mathematical predictions of what we would see.

Kind of sad that after all the amazing effort and resources that have gone into the creating the image that the international team couldn't have featured an explanation as clear as this in their actual press conference.

<comment><USER4> The video by Veritasium is by a guy who literally got a PHD on the subject of making physics more approachable through videos. He is exactly the person I would expect to provide a more clear and understandable explanation.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be&t=280)

<comment><USER5> Why doesn't he work with the actual astronomers, then?

<comment><USER6> Because he's busy making physics more approachable through videos.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I should have phrased it as "why don't astronomers work with _him_?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Higher resolution official release seems to be: [https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/download...](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/downloads/A-Consensus.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Does that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?

<comment><USER9> Yes, reminds me of the Eye of Sauron.

<comment><USER10> Funnily, it reminds me of Soundgarden's album, Superunknown, which had the famous song 'Black Hole Sun.'

[https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown- Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8...](https://www.amazon.com/Superunknown- Soundgarden/dp/B00IXLQJ8U)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related video, made by Veritasium yesterday, is one of my favorite videos in a long time. He explained how the prediction of this image was made (before the image got released) and the video is great and fun to watch.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

<comment><USER12> Note that the prediction of the light being brighter on one side did come out.

<comment><USER13> What are you basing that on? (Edit:) From one of the papers released today:

> The ring is brighter in the south than the north. This can be explained by a > combination of motion in the source and Doppler beaming. As a simple example > we consider a luminous, optically thin ring... Then the approaching side of > the ring is Doppler boosted, and the receding side is Doppler dimmed...This > sense of rotation is consistent with the sense of rotation in ionized gas at > arcsecond scales ..Notice that the asymmetry of the ring is consistent with > the asymmetry inferred from 43 GHz observations of the brightness ratio > between the north and south sides of the jet and counter-jet

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0f43](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0f43)

(Edit 2:) Ahh, I see your comment now says "did come out". I initially read it as "did not come out", which was either a misreading on my part (likely) or an earlier edit by you.

<comment><USER9> Are north and south in astronomy defined relative to Earth's poles? What about "lateral" directions, since east and west are relative (no poles, ie. no east of earth)?

<comment><USER13> I don't know for sure how that's defined (I ctrl-f'd and it's not explained in the paper), but this says the "North" is to the right of the image, and from context it sounds like it's the north pole of the accretion disk, i.e., the direction of the rotation axis with the right-hand rule.

> The approaching side of the large-scale jet in M87 is oriented > west–northwest (position angle $\mathrm{PA}\approx 288^\circ ;$ in Paper VI > this is called ${\mathrm{PA}}_{\mathrm{FJ}}$), or to the right and slightly > up in the image.

<comment><USER14> In paper I, Figure 3, it says North is to the top of the image and East is to the left.

<comment><USER13> Whoop. You're right. I misread again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808](https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808)

Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.

Kip's description of black holes here is also fascinating: [https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M](https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M) — first time I learnt what "warped" space-time means :)

<comment><USER16> Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.

[0] [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

[1] [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip- thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/)

<comment><USER15> Agree with the recommendation.

Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some "Nobel guilt" for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.

I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)

There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip's equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> International collaboration on scientific projects (International space station, CERN) always fills me with hope and optimism for humanity.

It's a nice contrast to opening the papers and reading the regular news, dominated by politics, with all the pessimism that creates.

Hooray for science.

<comment><USER18> If I understand it, this class of "telescope" is made up of arrays of telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It literally can't exist without broad support from many countries.

As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on those too but if that involves a lot of satellites in a heliocentric orbit that may limit contributions considerably.

<comment><USER19> Constructing a telescope on Mars would be a valuable investment when a permanent presence is based there.

<comment><USER20> Mars is smaller than Earth, so planet-wide radio interferometry would be a smaller "aperture" than possible on Earth. If you're talking about extending the telescope to include both Earth and Mars, I imagine that doing the interferometry over changing speeds and distances would be challenging to say the least.

<comment><USER19> The speeds and distances of the planets are well known at this point and easily predicted. By the time of establishing a permanent presence on Mars the requirements of communications would already put in place the information needed if the DSN isn't already capable of it now. The compute needed would be greater, but so would the availability of it in the future too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The papers with the scientific details are here (open access):

[https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E...](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT)

Article in physics world with comparisons to simulations:

[https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole- unve...](https://physicsworld.com/a/first-images-of-a-black-hole-unveiled-by- astronomers-in-landmark-discovery/)

"AskScience" AMA on Reddit about the breakthrough:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscien...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_here_to/)

<comment><USER22> From reddit:

>"Hi, regarding the image itself: What I don't understand is why does it look like a donut and not a bright sphere? Assuming the black hole is actually spherical and not disc shaped, I would expect the Halo to be spherical and surrounding the black hole? so all we would see would be the ball of bright gas, even though there is a black hole in the middle?"

This is also what I would have expected.

<comment><USER23> Material can come in towards the black hole from any angle. However, because matter can't just pass through other matter, matter travelling in the wrong directions will collide more frequently than matter travelling in the right direction. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the "right" direction will depend on the average angular momentum of everything in the cloud that is collapsing into the disk.

You might be interested to know that this is the same reason all the planets in our solar system orbit in the same disk: all the matter that is now in our solar system was originally a very thin cloud of gas with a small amount of overall angular momentum. As gravity drew it together it flattended out into a disk and eventually the clumps became planets (and the sun in the middle.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am not trying to throw cold water on this, but I have some questions.

This ted talk has a very basic explanation of how they constructed this image. I was curious if anyone with image interpolation experience could weigh in on the method. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU)

When she first starts explaining their method around 8:00m in, I was initially very skeptical of this result because she said that they feed images of what we "think" a black hole should look like and use algorithms to compare the captured data with those images.

She then goes into explaining the measure they take to keep the resulting image from being biased by passing environmental images and images of other astronomical anomaly to make sure that those images return similar results.

But I can't for the life of me figure out how passing non-stellar imagery could return something similar. And if it does, why do we need to feed it an example of what we think it should look like at all?

<comment><USER25> Was just wondering this myself. How opinionated is this photo?

<comment><USER26> Probably very opinionated. I can't help but take this with a grain of salt. relevant example .How long did it take for people to evolve our view of dinosaurs as information was reevaluated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This 9 min video [0] does an excellent job explaining what we are looking at.

[0] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER28> The US unveiling is WAY better than the EU unveiling that is linked to above. They have images, animations and graphs that's easily understandable by the layperson, and it's scientists instead of politicians speaking.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk)

They talk about how the image was produced, and how they made such a small image out of the 5 PetaByte of data they gathered from stations all over the world.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, no kidding. The presentation in the American conference is much more insightful and gives a stronger perspective. And the EU conference didn't even show the image until 8 minutes in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of the cool things about this was that the data was too large to ship over the internet (in a reasonable amount of time). They actually shipped physical disks full of data.

Even today, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of disks...

</comment><comment><USER31> "This is more realistic of the uncertainties involved in this high-end image reconstruction. Still amazing though! Fig. 4 in [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85) "

[https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/111598136971105894...](https://twitter.com/karlglazebrook/status/1115981369711058944)

<comment><USER32> Yeah, apparently radio interferometry is still very manual and so involves many relatively subjective decisions to produce an image.

That's probably why they had several analysers that they then combined into progressively larger teams until they could produce this Consensus-A picture.

<comment><USER33> There is non-manual ways to do it (called self-calibrating), but those need many more antennas. (What you really need is good coverage of the (u,v) plane AND many more different baselines between pairs of telescopes than the number of individual antennas.) If you do not have that self-calibration fails and leads to horrible image artifact or does not converge at all. They limited the influence of the manual calibration by observing a Quasar which is basically a point source between subsequent observations of M87* to get an independent amplitude calibration.

<comment><USER32> Some quasar other than M87 I suppose :P

(It is a quasar, simbad says so and that's good enough for this setting!)

<comment><USER33> Yes. They used 3C 279 which is more than 100 times further away than M87.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For those wondering how the image was constructed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsNd1W_lmE)

Basically, the image has been constructed by calculations on massive measurement data-sets from multiple synchronized telescopes around the world.

So this isn't a "photo" in the normal sense. It's a reconstruction of many, many radio waves.

</comment><comment><USER22> It doesn't sound like they just snapped a picture. The one guy says they used "supercomputers" for 6 months to get the image.

Sunspots look black relative to the rest of the sun but are actually very bright. Could this be the same thing? How did they set the black level? Is there a description of the procedure somewhere?

EDIT:

Found the paper describing the data processing: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0c57)

<comment><USER35> As far as I know K. Bouman [0] was the scientist leading the charge on the image processing/reconstruction. A few of her later papers probably have hints [1, 2] about how this is done, but I haven't seen the official release.

[0] [http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08832.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08832.pdf)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07361.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07361.pdf)

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I think I added the link to the paper while you were writing this. From skimming it I can't tell the answer to my question though.

How do they know what appears "black" in the image is really black vs. relatively black?

<comment><USER35> If you observe a very wide band of light (e.g., EM radiation) and there is nothing received from those spots, then, for all intents and purposes, the region of that image is black.

Now, if you're asking if, perhaps, the region isn't really black, but rather it's emitting some sort of small radiation relative to the bright region, it would be essentially impossible to know without much higher resolving powers (since it might even be indistinguishable from the background noise generated by the surrounding region). There is no way to really know if it's "perfectly black" vs. "orders of magnitude darker than the surrounding regions."

<comment><USER22> Makes sense. So I guess they could probably tell us an upper bound on how bright it is.

<comment><USER35> Indeed! That's for sure: it's probably not hard to extract a bound on the magnitude of a part of the spectrum from this analysis.

<comment><USER22> Any idea how bright it might be? Eg, could it be as bright as the sun? The moon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't get the whole "oh it's too blurry and nothing is visible" comments. It's a black hole, what did you expect to see? Interstellar CGI?

<comment><USER37> It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.

<comment><USER38> Consider yourself lucky that a black hole isn't Jupiter level distance from us.

<comment><USER37> At a jupiter level distance we'd be well within the event horizon. At that distance I expect to see four dimensional book cases and my daughter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's just a stupid collection of small pixels but somehow it feels very overwhelming looking at it for the first time.

What a time to be alive

<comment><USER40> Because that collection of pixels is really out there

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Excellent example of successful international collaboration, with distributed team. Great results and promising future work: they say Sagitarius-A* is their next target!

</comment><comment><USER42> The telescope's announcement is up, too: [https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/)

</comment><comment><USER43> The EU is finally learning from the US when it comes making a lot of fanfare for discoveries and other inventions.

<comment><USER44> Too bad they don't present it well. I just see self congratulating politicians and officials on some youtube stream.

Telling that it's a US organization that hosts the actual picture.

esa.int and eso.org seem to be down actually.

<comment><USER32> Both ESO and the NFS hosts the images, don't know what gave you any other impression.

And while the EC stream was pretty bad, at least they let you skip back in the stream and left it up after the presentation ended. The NFS stream wouldn't allow you to go back (useful if you joined late) while it was up.

Personally I liked the ALMA stream best, but it's down now :(

<comment><USER45> [https://eventhorizontelescope.org/](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/) is hosted in the US and the linked image links to a Harvard.edu web server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So is a black hole 3 dimensional? Is it a sphere? Or does it only work in certain directions? Does everything "fall" the same direction?

I ask because even in a brief history of time, the diagrams are very "single plane of space-time, pulled infinitely deep by the black hole"

<comment><USER47> A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single infinitesimal point. The event horizon around it is roughly a sphere. The diagrams that you are talking about are a visual metaphor that represent 3D space as a 2D plane and the 3rd dimension standing in for the influence of gravity. IRL, spacetime has 3 spatial dimensions, not 2, and gravity is not a dimension but a force. It's hard to visually represent gravitational distortion of 3 dimensional space without a 4th spatial dimension to do it with, so textbook diagrams use a 2D plane.

<comment><USER48> I think you've got a typo here: points should be 0-dimensional.

<comment><USER49> Are you sure it's a typo?

[https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/194947](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/194947)

(I'm not a physicist.)

<comment><USER50> I believe the previous poster is referring to a typo following from this:

>A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single infinitesimal point.

In Euclidean geometry,

A cube is 3 dimensions.

A plane is 2 dimensions.

A line is 1 dimension.

A point is ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So much higher res than I thought (I was expecting a 3x3px black and white).

Does anyone know if this is aggregated over a long time so it's unlikely to improve with more observation? And what is limiting the resolution at this point?

<comment><USER33> The limit in some sense is the size of the Earth. This picture is from an interferometer observing at very high radio frequencies (wavelength of 1.3 mm) using telescope around the Earth. To improve resolution you would either have to go to even higher frequencies (we have a very hard time doing interferometry there) or find baselines larger than what fits on Earth. And you don't just need a long baseline, but need to keep the baseline constant to within a fraction of the wavelength. So if you want to use satellites to get longer baselines you would have to know their orbit to within a tenth of a millimeter.

As an aside: that image is basically black and white. The intensity is just mapped to black -> orange -> white instead of black -> gray -> white.

<comment><USER52> I wonder how important time is in collecting these data? Because if 6 months isn't an issue, then the array size could be expanded in one axis to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the sun, no?

<comment> stargazer-3 The collecting time is important, but mainly to 1) sample the rotation of the Earth in the Fourier space for better angular resolution and 2) for raising your overall signal-to-noise ratio is the image (but the one released is already pretty good, so not much improvement can be done there unless you're trying to go for the faint features in the image).

Unfortunately, you can only do interferometry with simultaneous measurements (we need information about the difference in the phase of light hitting the receiving antennas), so the motion of Earth around the Sun is largely irrelevant, unless you can park another antenna at a trailing orbit (see space VLBI for that).

What you're thinking of is probably parallax measurements of distance - that's how missions like Gaia can pinpoint distances to stars in Milky Way (and some in its satellites as well).

<comment><USER51> Thanks.

We seem to need a big radiotelescope on the moon then? That should give simultaneous measurement on a much larger baseline?

<comment><USER33> I doesn't even need to be that big. A 60 meter dish would do nicely.

Problem is, you would want to have several Gigahertz of (radio) bandwidth. You are not going to down link that raw, but rather as a number of channels, integrated over a number of microseconds and digitized at something between 4 and 64 samples per bit, but we are still talking a down link data rate of gigabits per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is this what we would see with the naked eye if we were close enough to the black hole? Or would we see nothing, because at this distance we would be dead (or the universe ended all around us)?

<comment><USER54> These obs are in radio. We could replace your eyes with radio eyes... ..but it's friction heating so it ought to be broadly blackbody, so I would say yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> "This is like viewing a mustard seed in Washington DC from Brussels"

<comment><USER56> Pedantic/fun comment: I will assume that one of the presenters said that (I will watch the full video later tonight). One would imagine that that person knows that you cannot see a mustard seed from Brussels because the planet's crust is blocking your line of sight ;) unless the scientist who said that is a flat-earth-believer!

A statement like "it is like viewing a mustard seed X kilometres/miles away would be more appropriate.

And in all seriousness, I have started watching again everything-Star-Trek again (for the 5th time in my life), and news like that make me look up to the sky and think that as a species we do have a chance to move out of here and to a better future.

<comment><USER57> Such a photon-centric perspective. Why don't you use your neutrino perceptors to look at the seed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Why did they choose this very distant galaxy? why not something that's close to us like the andromeda galaxy or even the center of our own galaxy?

<comment><USER59> As I understand it, by being more massive this black hole has roughly the same angular size in the sky as Sag A* at the center of our galaxy, but none of the dusty foreground in the way so we get a clearer vantage point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does anyone remember Interstellar. Their black hole simulation was based on hard science. Looks fairly similar

<comment><USER61> just had my wife watch it and yea, that was the first thing I noticed, they really did a good job on the science of interstellar.

When interstellar came out wired did a full magazine spread on the movie, covering its science, how they came up with the story and what the director did to make sure it was believable. idk what it looks like online but I've kept the magazine.

<comment><USER62> The visualization I liked the best in Interstellar was that of the wormhole, seen from the outside. (The "travel" through it was rubbish.)

The thing would look like a mirror sphere, floating in the middle of space, reflecting the space around you. Except it would be the space on the other side of the wormhole, not that behind you, and the motion of the "mirrored" image would be opposite of that on a real mirror. (The apparent image on the wormhole's spherical surface would appear to move in your same direction, as you're moving around it, not in the opposite direction as it does on a spherical mirror.)

It took me a while to reason about it and figure out that it was indeed what a wormhole would look like, if we could find or create one.

[https://youtu.be/f3ptQ0CPMmU](https://youtu.be/f3ptQ0CPMmU)

<comment><USER63> Relevant paper: [https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.4916949?class=p...](https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1119/1.4916949?class=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Is black hole a 3D object like a sun? If so, I assume the light in the event horizon cover the whole object, i mean 3D shaped as well. How the picture taken from the telescope shown the dark area where the black hole is located? I mean, shouldn't the whole black hole covered by the light thus we can't see the black hole?

<comment><USER65> The black hole itself is spherical, but the light we're seeing around it isn't projected by the event horizon; rather, it's light from behind/around the black hole that isn't blocked. This video explains in much more detail: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

<comment><USER66> But if it's spherical, should not the light be all around it?

<comment><USER65> If it were emitting the light, yes, but it's not. It's more complicated than this, but imagine holding a black sphere in front of a light bulb. You'll see a ring of light around the sphere.

Somewhat separately, there's the accretion disk, which again is a disk not a sphere, much like other orbiting systems like solar systems or galaxies−the gravity between bodies orbiting the same central gravity source causes them to arrange roughly into a plane, rather than all having their own unrelated orbits. We're not seeing the accretion disk directly though, but rather the light from it, and from other sources, that is able to pass around the black hole. (ie the black sphere in front of the light bulb.)

Watch that video; it explains it in a very approachable way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> How big a VLBI baseline would they need to see much more detail? Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start.

Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.

<comment><USER68> Space VLBI is a thing already! Seems to have been around for a while [0][1]. I imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink bandwidth... there's just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about down from a satellite. It's already so much data that it's easier to fly hard drives around the world than to send it over the internet, so the transfer would probably take ages over a microwave link. Maybe with laser communication in the near future but even then... it's a lot of data.

Resolution-wise, the angular resolution is inversely proportional to the farthest baseline, as given by the Rayleigh criterion. [2] To get twice the resolution, you "just" need to double the size of your baseline (and do that in both dimensions, otherwise the angular resolution will be different in x & y). We've maxed out the Earth's baseline, so it seems like orbital radio telescopes are the only way to better resolution. Pretty exciting!

[0] - [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/space-very-long- baseline-i...](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/space-very-long-baseline- interferometry-space-vlbi/)

[1] - [https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/07/25/thi...](https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/07/25/thirty- years-of-space-vlbi/)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution)

<comment><USER69> > We've maxed out the Earth's baseline, so it seems like orbital radio > telescopes are the only way to better resolution.

Going to higher frequency gives you higher resolution for a given physical baseline length.

<comment><USER70> For some observations, they've used the earth's moving position in space to create a synthetic-radar style image. That gives an 'aperture' of 180M miles.

<comment><USER69> > For some observations, they've used the earth's moving position in space to > create a synthetic-radar style image. That gives an 'aperture' of 180M > miles.

That may not work for imaging the immediate surroundings of black holes – one can only combine the data for that SAR-style imaging if the source you're observing doesn't vary significantly (e.g., in brightness or flux distribution) between observations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Katie Bouman herself did a fascinating Ted Talk behind the effort involved for creating the first image of a black hole:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hol...](https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like)

</comment><comment><USER72> So we got an image of one in a far away galaxy before the one in the center of our own galaxy!

<comment><USER73> Is this due to occlusion?

<comment><USER33> A lot of the problems with imaging the black hole at the center of the milkway is that we would have to look along the midplane of the galaxy towards the center. That is where a lot of gas and dust is to be found and the radio waves interact with that stuff. They did take data and are working on it, but the image of M87* was easier to reconstruct and went out first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Breakthrough discovery in astronomy: press conference

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

<comment><USER74> And the image itself:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg)

<comment><USER7> Is this image lossy compressed by Twitter? Is there an official release?

<comment><USER75> [https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/formedia...](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/formedia.jsp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I always thought we have photographed black holes. Any idea/link to article where it explains why this took so long and why it was difficult?

<comment><USER77> Their website talks about some of the challenges of getting a picture of a black hole: [https://eventhorizontelescope.org/home](https://eventhorizontelescope.org/home)

All of the data used to generate the image was gathered by around a dozen different telescopes around the world. The black hole itself also needs to be in a specific configuration in order for us to be able to see it. It needs to have an accretion disk that's generating light. It needs to be sufficiently large or close. And it can't be obfuscated by other astronomical objects like stars or nebulae. This black hole itself is hugeeeeee and far. It's about the size of our solar system, but it's ~52 million light years away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Does anybody noticed that there are two brighter areas (not just one) in bottom part of the image.

One at approx 8PM and one at approx 5-6PM (if seen as clock)

</comment><comment><USER79> The image of the black hole is not sharp. Isn't it possible, that the optics at that distance may make "optical mistakes" and this is not a black hole after all but maybe just some circular lightning or some darker, but not black object before some star - like in solar eclipse?

</comment><comment><USER80> The thought struck me that the interferometry technique used must have gathered data from a much wider field of view than of just the black hole.

Burried in that 5 petabytes of data is likely a scan of a much larger field of view at a similar resolution.

<comment><USER33> Yes. But since you have a bright spot in the center of the larger image and you only have a limited number of baseline between pairs of telescopes there will be all kinds of artefacts in the outer portion of that large image. So it get's cropped away. (Most of it is actually never even computed).

<comment><USER80> I still think it would be worth pursuing. I hope the raw data will be made available at some point... Not that I have 5 petabytes free space available right now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Here it is: [https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild- ist...](https://image.futurezone.at/images/cfs_932w/3398269/bild-ist-da.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER82> Here's the image via twitter: [https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328](https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1115964692802019328)

<comment><USER83> Here's the image via a URL:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png)

> Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event > Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image > shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a > black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> So how come it's a ring of plasma that forms and not a sphere? Like we can see the hole unobstructed? Is it because gravity tends to clump things together? I guess Saturn's rings are the same?

<comment><USER33> Saturns ring, the flattening of the accretion disk, the fact that planet systems will have most planets more or less in one plane and that spiral galaxies are flat (much thinner than they are wide at least) all have the same reason, yes. Basically most orbits align due to initial orbital momentum and the stuff that orbits in other directions sooner or later experiences enough friction to be forced into the common orbital plane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Here's an animated explanation of the process by the Event Horizon Telescope. [https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE](https://youtu.be/hMsNd1W_lmE)

<comment><USER86> Misspeak? This video says it's 4 million times as massive as the sun, but today's press release and Wikipedia article about it both say it's 6.5 _billion_ times as massive.

<comment><USER87> The black hole at the center of the milky way is 4 million times the mass of our sun, the one in the photograph is much more massive. Im guessing that is what they were referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Let's say I were to jump into this black hole for fun. What happens to me? What are the chances I go somewhere cool, like another universe, versus getting turned into a spaghetti noodle?

<comment><USER89> Don't it's no fun you'll get space sickness trust me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I understand this was done by coordinating multiple telescopes to create a virtual earth size scope. Why is this not done more? It seems like cloud services would make this relatively easy to share bits technically. Are the issues mostly political or are there tech issues making this harder to do more often? Tangential question: if we can do this with an earth-size virtual scope, what could we do with a larger one? Scopes on earth/moon/Lagrange points synced together.

<comment><USER91> It's been done since the 1970s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer)

There are some proposals to do it in space.

[https://www.universetoday.com/139566/instead-of-building- sin...](https://www.universetoday.com/139566/instead-of-building-single- monster-scopes-like-james-webb-what-about-swarms-of-space-telescopes-working- together/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna)

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> So how can we make a planet sized synthetic aperture optical telescope?

I'm wondering if there is a way to do it with holograms (since they preserve phase information): take holograms of the object from opposite sides of the earth and then combine them offline. There are some papers in this direction:

[https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document](https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-00654840/document)

(spy satellites probably already do it...)

</comment><comment><USER41> Can we see nearest stars and planets using this method? Or is it only for radio sources?

One day we may even connect millions of smartphones to observe various interesting space phenomena.

</comment><comment><USER93> On a tangent, interesting closing remarks from the commissioner on the importance of courage, dreams and science. Targeted towards the present anti- science climate.

</comment><comment><USER94> Any word if Einstein's predictions are correct or refuted? There was word that if the shadow looked a certain way it could mean that relativity is incomplete.

<comment><USER95> General relativity predicted the event horizon, but it breaks down when trying to predict what is going on in the center, as all equations go to infinity, which is likely to be more a problem with our current understanding than what is actually happening.

<comment><USER96> I wonder if this is a call for another level of math. Are we just not able to take the derivative of something in respect to space time rather than just time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.

<comment><USER33> Have a look at the papers listed at the bottom of [https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E...](https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT) .

Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they have used CASA and AIPS, two standard software tools that have been developed over more than a decade. Details are consequently scattered over many papers. Radio interferometry is not new and there is entire textbooks on the subject. The exiting bit here is not that we go a first image from interferometry but that we have a first image of the region just around a black hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Here's an article (and image) from the guardian: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black- hole-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture- captured-for-first-time-in-space- breakthrough?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1554901867)

</comment><comment><USER41> Why there are two live events right now? One is from Europe, another from US:

EU: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

US: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re_o0uckG-M)

<comment><USER99> There are 6. It's an international accomplishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> If there's a God, He must be so incredibly proud of us. What we have accomplished as a species is just mind-blowing.

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder how it compares to the one from Interstellar?

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-t...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars- true-black-hole-too-confusing/)

<comment><USER13> This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk).

[http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imagin...](http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imaging- black-holes/)

<comment><USER101> Since we're on it, there's actually a book about the science of interstellar.

[https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip- Thorne/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip- Thorne/dp/0393351378)

<comment><USER102> The author (Thorne) was actually a producer for the movie, as well as a being a physics professor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google Cache because site got stomped with traffic

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.eso.org/public/)

<comment><USER41> Even that page is not opening for me ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I have a real problem with this..

they have not taken a picture of a black hole because that is not possible..

they have at best constructed an image of some effects of a black hole.

This is where top scientists do damage to science for ordinary people when they make fundamental errors in public statements.

</comment><comment><USER104> Anyone else getting sick of the media calling this the first "PHOTOGRAPH" of a black hole? It's a spectrograph at best and more realistically a rendering. Don't get me wrong it's really cool but it's not a photo.

<comment><USER105> You are wrong, this is definitely a photo, shot by multiple telescopes global- wise.

<comment><USER104> Multiple radio telescopes right? Then the data was compiled and rendered into an image, you really think it's that bright? How about orange? I wonder why it's not symmetrical? I suppose you can take multiple images combine them into one, run it through a bunch of filters and call it a photo but I still think it's more of a rendering than a photo.

<comment><USER106> > Then the data was compiled and rendered into an image

A digital camera is just an array of tiny sensors that detect how much light hit them and a computer takes those values and renders an image from them.

> you really think it's that bright?

If you take a photo in a dark room with increased exposure then the resulting image is brighter than what you see with your own eyes. This was taken over a long period of time, effectively a long exposure. If you were close enough to see it at the scale you are seeing it on your computer screen it would probably be far brighter.

> How about orange?

As mentioned in another comment on this thread, it's just the colour scheme used in the output to show the brightness differences. The accretion disk is not necessarily orange, this photo is essentially greyscale mapped to a black -> orange -> white scale.

This is just an array of relatively large sensors with very high exposure gathering information from something very far away and combining that data in greyscale.

> I wonder why it's not symmetrical?

See Veritasium's video [1] on why it looks like it does, in short, the effects of the black hole and our angle to the accretion disk.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> If you want to jump directly to the image, here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE&t=8m28s)

</comment><comment><USER58> Can the equipment used from several places on earth for this be deployed in space (may be to a geostationary orbit)? Not thinking about cost for a moment is this a far-fetched thought or such a thing is technically possible.

<comment><USER108> Yeah. There were a few NASA projects attempting to do this that got cancelled circa 2010 (programs called TPF-I and SIM).

Something that has been done for a while is using a single telescope in space in conjunction with some on Earth. Russia has a radio telescope in orbit called Spektr-R. I think it died recently, but Spektr-R did interferometry with other telescopes on Earth. When it was operational, I believe it was the widest VLBI array— its orbit was higher than GEO (and even intersected the moon's!), so it got pretty good distance from the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Katie Bouman's 2017 TED video explaining how the image was taken [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs)

</comment><comment><USER110> Reminds me of this project (building a realistic blackhole raytracer) [http://rantonels.github.io/starless](http://rantonels.github.io/starless)

</comment><comment><USER111> This is fantastic. But why did it take so long to prove the existence of blackholes ? are there any scientific breakthroughs that made it possible or it's more a technological achievement ?

</comment><comment><USER112> To be clear, they detected the black hole because it _looked like_ the way we expect a supermassive black hole to be? Or were there other hints that led to it being discovered where it was?

</comment><comment><USER113> The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.

</comment><comment><USER114> There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...

<comment><USER115> There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.

<comment><USER116> Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence.

And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes' argument that there is no real evidence of _anything_ except our own existence.

btw, I'm just some hacker's AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.

<comment><USER117> FML I just took this literally and was breaking down the post to see how this could have been an ML-based response from a bot. Then I looked at the poster's other comments and realized I'm an idiot. :(

<comment><USER116> We're all idiots, my friend. Remembering that is the hardest and most important work we can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> Pardon my naïveté, I never took advance physics, but if light can't escape from a blackhole, then how can we "take a picture" of one?

<comment><USER119> It's a photo of the absence of light (in the middle) and light/particles swirling around the black hole that haven't passed the event horizon (yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> How come it so happens we are looking at the black part while the sides are bright? Does it look like a O from any angle of the sphere?

</comment><comment><USER18> How jaded have I become that when I see four old men and one young person I automatically assume the younger one did all the work?

</comment><comment><USER121> Now I'm really curious if Quantum Entanglement will work if you send one of the entangled particles into a black hole.

</comment><comment><USER122> Is this a 2D slice of the actual spherical black hole?

Because if a black hole is a sphere, then shouldn't the whole thing be golden?

<comment><USER123> The black hole is warping spacetime around it in a severe fashion. The innermost (unstable) orbit is called the photon sphere, and light can make several orbits around the hole before either falling in, or going off to infinity. The result is that (depending on the hole's rotation relative to your point of view) you're going to see roughly the same image we have today. You're actually going to see multiple images of the entire hole, stretched around the outer edge, and those images multiplied and distorted again. If you could somehow "stand" by the photon spehere you'd see the back of your own head many many times.

The other factor is that while the event horizon itself is a spheroid, the accretion disk of bright infalling material is not. The horizon is totally black, so it will always look roughly like seeing a disk face-on no matter where you look at it. The accretion disk is a "hoop" that's stretched and the image is multiplied and distorted by the strong warping of spacetime in the region. As a result you get smeared and repeated views of the _entire_ disk including portion behind the hole in a kind of bent band. Plus the whole thing is subject to strong Doppler beaming hence the bright and dark regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> It's really amazing that human mind can predict and tell the things without even seeing it.

How come we even know and predicted the radius and things far away in galaxy without even seeing it. It's just amazing. Wow it just amazes you that scientist even have predicted the radius of thing and how it work etc.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

</comment><comment><USER125> Numbers about measures and dimensions are mind blowing. You can find articles with more details.

</comment><comment><USER126> This is so phenomenal. What an amazing and tremendous effort from that team!

</comment><comment><USER127> The reveal happens at -27:06

</comment><comment><USER128> This is one of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen. Fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER129> Does this confirm or disapprove Steven Hawking Black-hole radiation?

<comment><USER130> The Hawking radiation for a black hole with this mass would be really small. It actually decreases with added mass. So, this observation does not say anything about Hawking radiation.

<comment><USER131> Shouldn't it increase, just with square of the radius, so it's dwarfed by all the effects that scale with cube of the radius?

<comment><USER33> The temperature is actually inversely proportional to black hole mass and the power that is radiated away even falls like the square of the mass. (A rough but illustrative derivation can be found in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#A_crude_anal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#A_crude_analytic_estimate) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> 100 billion kilometres wide, is that correct?

</comment><comment><USER133> Can someone explain in layman terms: If graviton particles or gravity waves travel at light speed, how does this information escape the event horizon?

<comment><USER30> It doesn't. It escapes from _outside_ the event horizon. The event horizon is the dark area in the middle.

<comment><USER133> A rephrasing: How does the gravity-information about what's inside the event horizon get out?

<comment><USER30> That's a _really_ interesting question. (And you did say "graviton particles or gravity waves" in your first post, and I missed that.)

At first glance, I _think_ that the gravity information can't escape from inside the event horizon, just like light can't. That means that the event horizon describes a frozen version of the mass inside it, not a current "live" version.

And that seems to work, if you think about gravity waves. There aren't any changes to the gravitational field coming out from inside the event horizon. But it doesn't work so well if you think about gravitons. "There aren't any gravitons coming out" should be equivalent to "flat worldlines", which is very much not true just outside the event horizon.

It also doesn't seem to work for a situation like a black hole merger. The spacetime outside the event horizon is this frozen snapshot, but it can still do this spiral around this other black hole? That doesn't seem to make a ton of sense.

So I'm not sure my answer is very good. But it's a _fascinating_ question. If anyone has a real answer, I'd love to hear it.

<comment><USER134> It's not that interesting unfortunately, although I liked your approach. A graviton would be just another boson like a photon, and like a photon would be unable to escape. All of the worldlines of a graviton within the event horizon would lead to a collision with th singularity. It's just another aspect of "No Hair" on the hole.

Remember that this applies everything where r≤1. As far as "flat" worldlines I think you might be thinking of a geodesic approaching r=1 in terms of a null geodesic, which isn't necessarily true unless we're dealing with a photon or graviton. Regions I,II of the Classic Kruskal-Szekeres extension illustrates this pretty clearly.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates#/media/File%3AKruskal_diagram_of_Schwarzschild_chart.svg)

The total mass of the black hole (and all other information possible about it) can be described in terms of the boundary at r=1, so there's no problem with mergers or accretion. To answer Wallace's original question, we see _no_ information escaping the black hole. What we're seeing is sort of like shining a light on an absence of information, and observing the shadow cast. That's not quite right, but it's close.

<comment><USER30> But there pretty clearly is a gravitational field at r > 1\. If that field is made up of gravitons, and a graviton can't escape from the mass to outside r = 1, then what is the source of the gravitons that compose the field at r > 1? If they don't originate at the mass, then... what?

<comment><USER134> The manifold is well-behaved and continuous at r=1, and mass is one of the few characteristics a black hole has other than spin and charge. Gravitons from within the event horizon won't escape, but the event horizon itself can be thought of as the entire black hole (for everything outside of the black hole).

This discussion might help where my ability to answer your excellent question is failing: [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does- gra...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gravity- escape-a-black-hole)

<comment><USER30> Thank you for that link - it was very helpful. Summarizing:

The same problem would exist for the electric field from a charged black hole. However, static fields don't need propagating photons to establish them, so you don't have to get photons from inside the black hole in order for the electric field to be established outside.

The same would be true of gravitons. But one respondent indicated that general relativity can't do a second quantization like electromagnetism, and therefore gravitons are... suspect? Impossible? Not proven? It wasn't clear to me how strongly to take that statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> What do you reckon is in the black hole?

</comment><comment><USER136> Why are they all wearing suits?

</comment><comment><USER137> Is this as real as the computer edited NASA images (eg of earth) or is the _actually_ real?

</comment><comment><USER138> Here's today's xkcd comparing it to the size of our solar system: [https://xkcd.com/2135/](https://xkcd.com/2135/)

</comment><comment><USER139> What a time to be alive! I wish Hawking got to see it.

<comment><USER139> Lol, why would someone downvote this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER140> black ties and revelations...

</comment><comment><USER141> why is it oblong???

<comment><USER142> If you mean the brightness asymmetry, it's because the accretion disc is spinning. This video predicts pretty well all of the features we expected to find, and it lines up with the actual image.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Live Stream: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr20f19czeE)

<comment><USER41> Thanks! Over 150,000 viewers right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> 502 Bad Gateway

<comment><USER42> Screenshot from press conference: [https://imgur.com/UBsPgzw](https://imgur.com/UBsPgzw)

Edit: Better posted above: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER143>
      INT. EUROPEAN COMMISSION – PHONE RINGS

      SAMARA
      Seven days...

</comment><comment><USER144> Why does the ESA always couch their discoveries in these stupid press conference panels? Every time I try to watch something of theirs it's a bunch of old people blabbing. Show the pictures and stop talking!

<comment><USER145> This isn't ESA, it's unrelated EU-funded research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> My God, it's full of stars!

</comment><comment><USER147> A small thing. It could have been nice if the scientists didn't have commercial bottled water on stage. As an example to the world. Reusable personal containers would have been nice.

<comment><USER33> Most scientist I know have a reusable water bottle on their desk. And a coffee cup. But it will likely have a cat or a joke of the "astronomers do it in the dark" flavour on it. Not something you typically want to show on TV. Also they traveled from their home institutes to the location of the press conference and got handed that plastic bottle by some well-meaning PR person.

<comment><USER147> For this event they could have purchased multiple use containers for each person. Wasteful but a better image. So not really their personal containers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> One difference between a Tesla or Apple style event vs a staid, scientific one such as this. Starting in the evening vs 9am...

<comment><USER149> Isn't that related to the fact that it has been announced across the world at the same time? In europe it was announced at 3 pm for example. I'm sorry, I don't understand your point

<comment><USER148> That showmanship counts. I don't believe HN would argue with me if I said "a strong sales group can make or break a company". Why is it unfashionable to suggest that, in the marketplace of ideas, with an announcement of this magnitude, this exciting, this "sexy", the presentation of the announcement would benefit from being delivered in a likewise suitable atmosphere. At night, as an event, in a cool warehouse with cool music. I'm not trying to take anything away from the inherent excitement and importance of the news. Just suggesting that the cause could be furthered _even more_ if there was a little hype, a little showmanship. Rather than a well lit lecture hall populated by scruffy reporters, early in the morning, morning as defined in the locale the event is being held.

<comment><USER116> Appropriate types and degrees of showmanship/salesmanship depend on the target customer. And scientists, by and large, don't seem to be concerned with impressing the general public - or at least, that is far secondary to the importance of impressing other scientists.

One could argue that making an impression on other scientists is the basis of the scientific method. And we impress with the quality of our evidence and the repeatability of our experiments.

<comment><USER148> > And scientists, by and large, don't seem to be concerned with impressing the > public...

Some quotes from European Research Commissioner Moedas, answering the first question.

"...which is that this is linking between the citizens and science, how important is that?..."

"Because we want European citizens to feel connected."

"I've never seen this room so full."

"It's so refreshing to come here, to see so many people, to see people clap. I mean it's very rare in a press room to have people clapping."

During his introductory comments also, he is clearly excited and wants to engage people, and not simply through the scientific method. He talks about watching sci-fi movies as a kid and books on science.

People. It's ok to throw Science a party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> MASSSIVELY UNDERWHELMING

As a person who has no interest in these intergalactic shenanigans, it looks just like another ball on fire. I wanted to be excited, I really was, but this is just another picture.

A giant leap for mankind, and i fully recognize that, but the awe... nada. It's just another picture really. There is nothing fascinating about it.

Hats off to the people who brought this to us though. I know gravity of the matter and how daunting a task it was. Keep on!

<comment><USER151> Perhaps consider this: "VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6]."

What's surprising about this image is how utterly microscopic the thing is that was observed - from our location. The width of the event horizon is 40 billion kilometers. That's only 267x the diameter of our orbit around the Sun. But the M87 black hole is 26,000 light years away. 26,000 light years is 2.45979e+17 km, or 639,903,746,098 times farther away than the moon.

<comment><USER152> 53 million light years. 26 thousand would still be in our own galaxy.

<comment><USER151> Quite right. Thank you for the correction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is anyone else using Oh Life? - <AUTHOR>

I thought it received some of the least attention from the recent ycombinator projects.  After trying it, I literally post everyday.  Anyone else have any thoughts about this site?  Anyone using this for interesting reasons? <comment><USER2> There were several comments on it here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613137>

I think it's a neat idea. Technically easy, but some of the best ideas are. I'm not using OhLife, but I coded a version (mainly to see if Google apps could be used to make a webapp, but also because people were concerned about privacy - the script's in the above thread); and I've been using it for the past week or so. I keep a paper journal anyway, so it's not really necessary for me on that score.

I'm mostly interested in the effect of their idea of being reminded of a previous entry. I think a week isn't long enough to tell; but so far a positive is that it shows I've made progress. It's reminded me of things I wanted to do (or problems I wanted to solve), that I have now done (or solved). So I'm using it partly as a technical journal.</comment>


Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ <comment><USER2> More discussion. Here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bdpv1f/incr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bdpv1f/increasingly_competitive_college_admissions_much/)</comment>


Wasteful, damaging and outmoded: is it time to stop building skyscrapers? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/11/skyscrapers-wasteful-damaging-outmoded-time-to-stop-tall-buildings <comment><USER2> Building tall is one of the few real technologies that have made significant progress in terms of doing more with less. If you keep buildings short, you'll end up spending vastly higher a percentage of real wealth housing people in economic centres. Either you build tall, or the cost of land and housing goes up much faster than it already does.</comment>


CoreCLR on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aspnet/DNX/pull/1406

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else think that the MS Robot was more interesting than the actual pull request?

<comment><USER3> Google has a similar one on their projects[0] that is used for checking for CLAs. Seems like something that might benefit from being built into GitHub.

[0]: [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/pull/5484](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/pull/5484)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it would be nice if this could be built into the PR merge button status much like CI build info can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome to see rapid progress on this. Curious what people's thoughts are as to milestones to where you would trust CoreCLR (on Linux) for a production app.

<comment><USER6> Yeah im really looking forward being able to compile c# to native code and have things working well on Linux. (ie what mono didnt really achieve, but that you can do on windows right now with a recent VS)

Even thus I know all the hype is on Go (and Go is great), C# is pretty sexy too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the relationship of this project with Mono?

Mono has provided a Linux compatible .NET for a while. I have been using that one a backend system and it works well.

So just wondering if this is completely divorced from that effort or there is some cross polinations between them?

<comment><USER8> Yes, there is cross pollination. See this blog post from Miguel de Icaza for more details: [http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was also some work trying to get CoreCLR to compile on FreeBSD, but unfortunately the work stagnated:

[https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr](https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr)

For those interested in a challenge, I'm sure contributions are still welcome.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be very interesting to see a Docker container using this, so we could compare performance with the Mono one.

<comment><USER11> There is a docker container with Mono today and we'll do a more official one when CoreCLR is baked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good stuff! Can't wait to start writing some C# on a Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER12> You can already do that: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2014/06/11/mono...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2014/06/11/mono- how-to-install-on-a-raspberry-pi.aspx)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Favorite CMS? - <AUTHOR> Looking for recommendations on a CMS. My needs are pretty standard, blogging abilities and editable content for non-technical folks. Bonus points if it integrates with Rails nicely. <comment><USER2> Umbraco.

I was a .NET developer for many years before moving onto a Linux stack, but I am still yet to find a CMS that rivals Umbraco for ease of use.

It's open-source, has a great community behind it, has cloud offerings, and has enough extensions available that you can plug in (mostly) any functionality you want. The key thing, for me, is that it blows WordPress out of the water in terms of ease of use - it's not even remotely close.

It's not perfect by any means. there is a disconnect between what HQ wants and what the community asks for, the back-office is on Angular 1 (for good reasons - switching would break existing extensions), and it suffers from the same problem that WordPress suffers in that dev jobs are quite cheap. The ease of use means the market is flooded with bad developers, and there seems to be little incentive to offer more money to get quality in.

<comment><USER3> WordPress is a steaming pile of dung in a dumpster fire. I have not touched a codebase which has brought me more turmoil.

I hope to never touch it again.

If I had to start a new website I'd likely use craft or Jekyll+netlify+netlify CMS or forestry

<comment><USER2> I couldn't agree more, although I'd argue that there are two things that keep people using WP.

1\. The UI. Most people know it, at least a little bit, so it is sold on the fact that it is usable. I'd say this is true in the same sense that Hacker News has a great UI. It's functional, but all its warts are masked by its familiarity.

2\. The plugins. I know loads of WordPress developers in 2018 that couldn't tell you what composer is. I don't want to tar everyone with the same brush, but a lot of people choose WP because they don't need to write code, and that comes with its own problems when you want something a bit different to what your favourite plugin offers.

<comment><USER3> 3\. One-click installation on most cheap hosting accounts in the world.

The plug-ins could contain ok to vulnerable to malicious to disastrously bad code and could change from one version to another so when you update an OK plug-in you may introduce malware to your site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Grav is amazing for simple sites and my current favorite. I've used Drupal quite a bit for more complicated stuff; It's a beast. Wordpress is a nightmare technically but easy to use when it's working.

</comment><comment><USER5> For non-technical people, WordPress is your best bet. It definitely has its warts and flaws, but there is a giant pool of learning materials available and many people are already familiar with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> "..editable content for non-technical folks.."

WordPress. There is no better CMS when it comes to the ability to edit content by non-technical folks.

</comment><comment><USER7> you talking free? It also depends on what you're using it for. If it's just a blog, you have a few choices like WP, Drupal, Joomla or you can try Moveable Type.

You should check the plugins marketplace for each platform to check about RoR integration.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way not to see Google logo art? - <AUTHOR>

I have no interest to see google's editorializing through their logo. Is there a way to opt out of this nonsense? <comment><USER2> Yep, you can try Bing or Yahoo.</comment>


PHP frameworks benchmarked by Symfony - <AUTHOR> http://symfony-reloaded.org/fast php frameworks done in house by symfony, interesting but take them with a grain of salt. <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Symfony. It is the framework behind Delicious, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Bookmarks. I also used it to create <http://www.w3counter.com> and <http://www.w3roi.com>.</comment>


We thought we'd pulled a dead person out of the water - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/we-thought-wed-pulled-a-dead-person-out-of-the-water-woman-recovers-after-puget-sound-rescue <comment><USER2> There is a saying that goes "You're not dead until you're warm and dead.". There are many documented cases where hypothermia actually saved the lives of drowning people, by strongly reducing the metabolism until rescue.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "There was massive overpressurization of a cockpit on the flight deck that > essentially caused my lungs to explode and collapse," he said in a recent > telephone interview.

Kind of terrifying that that can happen, but equally incredible that the body can recover so well.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does that woman not suffer irreversible neurological damages after 4 hours without oxygen?

<comment><USER5> Hypothermia. You use far less oxygen if your metabolism has essentially ground to a halt.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4530563/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4530563/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24837800](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24837800)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322114/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322114/)</comment></comment>


Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251 <comment><USER3> This stuff is super important and it is good that it is being researched seriously. The money shot is right here in the abstract

>We find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less.

>We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.

In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun. The problem is that "the algorithms" (whatever recommendation ML algorithm YouTube has) works so damned well we are sucked into this endless shallow junkfood dopamine loop of videos that give us _just_ the right amount of dopamine to click on the next one.

If you're struggling, you're learning.

<comment><USER4> "A learning should be fun" assumption gets baked into an awful lot of discussions around Ed Tech and related topics. It's not that learning should always be painful/boring/etc. but I'm not sure that coming at education from an angle where if it's not enjoyable there must be something wrong is the right one.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, I actually do find learning fun. Even when it gets hard and frustrating. Almost especially when it gets hard and frustrating. It feels good when something finally clicks. Though I find it's not until some time later i realize this 'thing' I used to struggle with is now easy to understand.

For me it's the same reason I like video games. It gives me the same feeling learning something new, especially when I can connect it somehow to previous knowledge, that completing an especially frustrating section of a game I have to do over and over before I get it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was a professor (natural sciences) I decided to play around with different learning systems to see what worked best. I discovered the obvious that learning depth is negatively correlated with the student evaluation of their lecturer during the course and positively correlated a year later (students hate learning when they do it, but love the subject so much later that they choose your next course the following year because they learnt so much).

The more useful thing I discovered was getting the students to read the lecture notes before a lecture boosted the class average by 10% points. 10 minutes spent reading the lecture notes before the lecture and answering a few simple online multiple choice questions about the lecture was surprisingly effectively at improving learning. My assumption is it cut down on the novelty overload effect where the student's brains shut down mid-lecture and so they were able to get more out of the lectures.

<comment><USER7> Apparently, the reading technique is used throughout AWS to make meetings more productive.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025&ref=hvper.com&...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025&ref=hvper.com&utm_source=hvper.com&utm_medium=website)

> AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. > They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the > book club from hell.

>> Not just AWS- that's an Amazon-wide technique. And it's freaking amazing. You should try it.

<comment><USER8> I half wonder if in lecture format, a silent 60 minute reading session would be more productive. Lecturer is available to answer questions but other than that the textbook is the guide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Robert Bjork [0] talks a lot about this, in particular in [1], and also in his 1h long lecture "How we learn vs how we think we learn" [2].

It's important to distinguish between "performance" (how well you're doing right now) vs "learning" (how well you do after some time delay).

Compare blocked practice with interleaved practice. Suppose you're practicing calculating the area of different geometric figures of types A, B, C, etc.

Blocked practice means you do problems in the order of: AAAABBBBCCCC, etc.

Interleaved practice means you mix them up: ACCBAABACA, etc.

Blocked practice increases your performance (how well you're doing right now) because problems of the same type cluster together, i.e. you're able to "cache" the right formula and just plug in the numbers. But this doesn't help learning, because you're not practicing recognizing what features of the figure should prompt you to retrieve which formula from memory.

Interleaved practice reduces your performance, because more cognitive effort is required to retrieve the right formula, you might get it wrong, etc. But it improves learning, because you're training yourself to recognize which figure requires which formula.

So "desirable difficulties" can be introduced (of which interleaving is one) to increase learning at the cost of reducing performance.

[0] [https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/](https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/) [1] [https://youtu.be/gtmMMR7SJKw](https://youtu.be/gtmMMR7SJKw) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxZzoVp5jmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxZzoVp5jmI)

</comment><comment><USER10> I learned everything doing problem sets, and was completely lost during lecture. For every gifted undergrad who can integrate in real-time the lecturer's material, there are dozens if not hundreds of us normal folk who need to work things out at our own pace. With the advent of AI feedback systems, hopefully the western european notion of lecture becomes a thing of the past.

<comment><USER4> Non-interactive big room lectures can work but, in my experience, mostly by really top-notch lecturers especially for topics that are a bit less technical or, at least, not wholly math centric.

One big issue I think is that the big lecture hall environment is something of an anachronism. There is something of a forcing function but, for the most part, with a modicum of production work, the video version can actually be more useful than the live one. (At conferences these days, which I mostly attend for the "hallway track" anyway, I find I usually prefer to watch the streaming feed than to be crammed in a room with 10,000 of my closest friends.)

<comment><USER11> The school model is a bit fascist. The youtube or video model is an interesting way for academics to propagate their ideas because only the people who actually want to be there, show up. The ability to get Q&A from a community of broad but like-minded people in their interest for the topic makes for an incredibly focused experience. Like being engrossed in a campfire horror story rather than being forced to listen to paint dry.

The big problem with video, that makes me still value text based tutorials from the yesteryear (2000s), is that it's very hard to search for a particular sentence or string of information in a video. The varied pacing and delivery of information between speakers can get vary frustrating when you have to break your work flow to get to that exact moment in a video where the guy repeats what you want to hear inbetween ums and ahhs, and his 3rd time explaining a very basic concept.

Text still allows the reader to be in control of the pace & is the most easily searchable for the right information, which is vital for maintaining focus & flow at work. Video needs to catch up to that, hopefully automatic transcription can save the day.

<comment><USER4> People who create video and audio content should definitely consider getting transcriptions made. Automated transcriptions are still pretty mediocre but I get all my podcasts transcribed by humans. It's valuable for a lot of reasons: SEO, listeners who prefer to consume text, and myself for reusing material in other forms.

<comment><USER11> If you mean getting your podcasts transcribed means you run a podcast, what is it?

<comment><USER4> Innovate @Open is my relatively new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note the intervention to prime a desired response to difficulty.

With active learning, it's clear that early description of the approach, its effectiveness, and that it often doesn't feel like that, improves student approval, and outcomes(IIRC).

With 'belonging interventions', priming at-risk freshman with a narrative of "everyone here struggles - you get help, work hard, and succeed" inoculates against a narrative of "I'm struggling - they made a mistake admitting me - <USER2> clearly don't belong here", flipping a feedback loop of (not)forming academic and emotional support networks and (not)seeking help, and (not)succeeding.

One fun corner of medical reform involves medical interventions that are cheap, easy, with little downside, large upside, and no disagreement that they should happen. And still often don't. Promptly getting aspirin when presenting to the ER with heart pain, I recall as an example. It's been a long-term process improvement struggle that the profession has been pursuing for decades now.

One reflection of the state of education process improvement, is that this is barely even a conversation yet. And perhaps something personalized semi- automated teaching can help with. Everyone gets an intervention 'punch list'.

For example, checking and rechecking that _everyone_ , but especially students from no-previous-college families, has an "education is something I create for myself with help" model, instead of a "education is something the teacher does to me" model, seems something we might actually do, to great effect.

</comment><comment><USER13> it's a very interesting research topic but I'm disappointed by the paper (after a very quick look).

one immediate question I had, after read the abstract, is how are they going to measure learning result. without looking into the testing material, I'd argue if the tests were not carefully designed, it could produce whatever result anyone likes, by adjust depth/width ratio of the given subject. maybe the testing materials are so well regarded in the field so there would be no justification necessary, but by ignoring the possibility to readers, it feels not trustworthy to me.

back to the explanation of the result, it's entirely possible that learners (and the authors) not able to draw distinctions between information and performance. I'd assume the traditional teaching would expose much more information to students (anecdotes, connections to other fields), but 'active' learning could give better result in performance building in a narrowed domain.

I'll read carefully into the paper sometime later, but for now, it's not a paper I'd recommend. (feel free to downvote if I get anything wrong)

<comment><USER14> The paper covers this:

"The instructors did not see the TOLs [post-class test of learning], which were prepared independently by another author. 9) The author of the TOLs did not have access to the course materials or lecture slides and wrote the tests based only on a list of detailed learning objectives for each topic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article keeps ranting about active learning, but only describes one form of it (physics demonstrations and "interactive quizzes"). The problem here is the complete lack of active learning tools in stem and the garbage that passes for it in a vacuum. (no pun intended)

</comment><comment><USER12> One possible atypicality, is that Harvard freshmen have had unusually "excellent" pre-college teachers. Teachers clearly presenting well-organized information in an easily-accessible manner. And so are less likely than students with poorer teachers, to view understanding as something one creates for oneself, by wrestling with the material. So the wrestling of active learning is interpreted as a teaching fail. And the class overlaps and emphasizes the rude awakening that their pre-college learning strategies are no longer sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has been known for sometime, and is the reason we've built brilliant.org the way we have.

I'm sorry for the self-promotion, but it is extremely relevant in this case.

</comment><comment><USER8> The charts look weird. The intra-group student variances were so small on the tests of learning in all cases. That seems not right.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's fantastic! Being a lecturer at one of the universities I am very grateful to this research. It changes my perspective.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds, also, of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Here, those who've truly learned more are also more reserved in their self-evaluation – while those given a more comforting-but-transient "gloss" of instruction overestimate their learning.</comment>


Fabulous fossil preserves eyes of 429M-year-old trilobite - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/429-million-year-old-trilobite-already-had-modern-like-compound-eyes/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an exciting discovery. There are a number of great amateur collecting spots for trilobites out there. I've been to a few and collected some nice specimens but certainly never found one with the eyes intact.</comment>


E3 accidentally leaks personal details of journalists, YouTubers and analysts - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-03-e3-accidentally-leaks-personal-details-of-journalists-youtubers-and-analysts <comment><USER2> Might be more accurate, despite this being the headline, to change the title to "ESA accidentally leaks...". The ESA is the trade organization that puts on E3 and the entity that is ultimately responsible for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> While true, the leak was of a list of E3 attendees. The fact that it was of E3 attendees is the key fact. I tried different ways to fit ESA in while maintaining specificity, but all variations came out too long.

ESA instead of E3 wouldn't necessarily tell E3 attendees their information was leaked since not everyone knows the ESA puts it on. Personally, I've been around games all my life and had no idea.

Headlines are always a compromise. I think the author found a good one.

<comment><USER2> Definitely, just want to highlight the ESA as the organization responsible for people who might not be as familiar with the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The private details of 2,025 games industry journalists and video producers > have been leaked online.

Leaking the details of a couple thousand people isn't just a regret. Hopefully as more details come forward ESA actually makes an effort to clean up their mess.

<comment><USER4> Worse, it's being alleged that they've known the information was publicly accessible for months now.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/SophNar0747/status/11574576722219...](https://mobile.twitter.com/SophNar0747/status/1157457672221995009?s=19)

[https://mobile.twitter.com/SophNar0747/status/11574925673799...](https://mobile.twitter.com/SophNar0747/status/1157492567379972096?s=19)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given the hate and threats video game journalists and YouTubers already get, I can't imagine this will have a happy ending.

There was recently an incident of a FFXIV streamer being doxed and his (and his children's) lives threatened for their stance on the latest FFXIV raids. There are some real psychopaths out there.

<comment><USER6> Are there any other enthusiast groups that are this toxic? I stopped associating with the hobby after GamerGate but in retrospect I should have stopped earlier.

<comment><USER7> Sports? Arguably massively more toxic. People being murdered over sporting events is a truly ancient phenomenon and even destabilized empires clear back into ancient times (Nearly Half of Constantinople was burned down to the ground in the Greens vs Blues Nika riots).

<comment><USER8> Very good comparison and similarities can be drawn between the target audience. Unfortunately gaming sees deaths too with swatting and what not

<comment><USER7> If you want to draw a rigorously serious comparison you need to mathematically compare audience sizes and base rates. Don't know how it shakes out but my money is definitely on sports, if for no other reason than that video game fans don't congregate in huge arenas with heavy drinking as often as sports fans do

<comment><USER8> Completely agree. Though I can see a future where gaming gives it "competition" in this area. Especially with esports on the rise. Multi million dollar prizes and loyalties forming around these teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know the technical details of how this happened? Did someone just run a spider on the e3expo.com site and find the publicly accessible URL that way, or did they do something more advanced?

<comment><USER10> There was a direct link to the excel file on the "Helpful Links" page of the E3 Expo site.

<comment><USER11> The OP says:

>"Unfortunately, a vulnerability was exploited and that list became public." //

If it was just a link to a file on the website them claiming a vulnerability was exploited is like saying "my security system was overcome" if I dropped my wallet on the bus.

<comment><USER12> Based on the ESA statement it's probably a case of hanlon's razor where they have nobody on-staff to do a proper incident response. They also said they "shut down the site", which really meant they removed/hidden the page in WordPress but they didn't remove the culprit file nor did they take down the E3 website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's worse is that there was basically no reason for this leak to be possible. I mean, it was apparently a list of all people who'd successfully received a press pass for E3 2019. The leak was in the form of an Excel spreadsheet with that info hosted on their server.

So why was it even there? It's not the database they're using on the site; from what I've read that's a standard WordPress install. And the spreadsheet was unlikely to be needed outside the organisation itself.

Hence the ideal thing to do would have to be to somehow tie the WordPress DB into whatever system they were using. If that'd been done, the leak could never have happened in this way.

Alas they didn't, and by going with the old 'intern takes database details, puts them in a spreadsheet and shares around a link' method, exposed thousands of people's details online. It's basically a perfect case study for the dangers of ad hoc spreadsheet solutions and sharing 'private' links around to distribute customer info.

Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if someone did sue them under GDPR or what not at this point.

<comment><USER14> >So why was it even there?

>The list exists so that publishers and developers can invite analysts and media to events and private viewings that take place during the E3 show.

>We provide ESA members and exhibitors a media list on a password-protected exhibitor site so they can invite you to E3 press events, connect with you for interviews, and let you know what they are showcasing.

<comment><USER13> Well they say it was password protected, but the file could apparently be downloaded without logging in at all:

[https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/1157825611252957184](https://twitter.com/RLewisReports/status/1157825611252957184)

And even if it was, it feels like this system was implemented in the worst way possible. Could have been a CMS function that generated the list once credentials were provided or what not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best solution for these 'accidents' is mandatory jail-time for the CTO.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does this entity have dealings in Europe? If so it might be possible for GDPR to apply, and I can see this getting ugly if it does (as I believe it should, they should get massive fines for this).

<comment><USER17> GDPR would apply if the entity had personal information of European citizens.

<comment><USER18> > GDPR would apply if the entity had personal information of European > citizens.

Not quite, merely having data on an EU citizen is not sufficient to invoke GDPR.

To clarify, article 3 of GDPR specifies that it applies to companies that market specifically to EU citizens or specifically monitor EU behavior of their customers. [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/](https://gdpr- info.eu/art-3-gdpr/)

This is taken by many to broadly mean that when an EU citizen purchases something by (for example) a US company where the product is marketed only to US citizens, GDPR does not apply.

For example: [https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/who-must- comply/](https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/who-must-comply/)

"May be insufficient evidence [if] The firm's website is accessible to EU residents"

<comment><USER19> > GDPR specifies that it applies to companies that market specifically to EU > citizens or specifically monitor EU behavior of their customers

Does that mean that if you market to the world (i.e. anyone who might hit the site, making no mention of world nationalities) but not _specifically_ to the EU (i.e. You make no mention of anything specific to the EU in any part of a site and you don't differentiate them in any way from non-EU users) then the GDPR doesn't apply?

<comment><USER20> Market doesn't mean advertise, it means to bring products to market, so yes, bringing products to market for the world is also bringing them to market for the EU.

<comment><USER18> > Market doesn't mean advertise

Broadly speaking, the verb "to market" does mean "to advertise or promote" (try Googling "define market", and see the verb definition).

> so yes, bringing products to market for the world is also bringing them to > market for the EU.

While that's true in a sort of technical sense, the GDPR text explicitly contradicts the notion that failing to restrict EU citizens from buying something amounts to requiring GDPR compliance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>