Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
As I mentioned yesterday, today is the day that the Event Horizon Telescope team will announce “a major discovery”, which will almost certainly include the first photographic image of a black hole.
The announcement will be livestreamed at 9 a.m. Eastern Time in the US or 1300 GMT. Sadly, I’ll be on my way to the dentist’s for my semiannual tooth cleaning, and will have to miss this, but you don’t have to. Just go to the YouTube site below just before the times noted above, and you’ll see this exciting announcement.
I’ll watch it afterwards, but it won’t have the emotional impact of the live announcement. So it goes.
Reader Bryan called my attention to the fact that in exactly 24 hours, a photo of a black hole (if there is indeed such a photo), will be released for the first time. The project is described in this New York Times article, which gives this context:
At 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday April 10, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil their long awaited pictures of a pair of putative black holes. One of the objects sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, and equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe.
The other target is in the heart of Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo, where a black hole 7 billion times the mass of the sun is spewing a jet of energy thousands of light-years across space.
According to calculations, and if all has gone well, either or both of the black holes should appear as a tiny shadow backlit by the glow of radio energy at the galactic center.
They might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether they are rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing them are slightly wrong, or if they are spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe.
. . .astronomers are thrilled at the prospect of finally, actually seeing the previously unseeable.
“Yes, I’m definitely excited to see the image!” Daniel Holz, of the University of Chicago, wrote in an email. “It’s not really rational, since I know the math works and the theory has been thoroughly tested. But still, this would be a picture of the real thing, up close and personal. That is super cool.”
Read more below. The article says that although we don’t know for sure if the image of a black hole will be captured, the scientists are acting as if they have something to show: there will be a simultaneous announcement in six places and a big party at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. So this should be cool, and we’re luck to see it in our lifetime.
Bryan also sent a link to this 9-minute video, adding that “Derek Mueller has a very lucid theoretical primer – using tangible props and minimal computer graphics ( I particularly liked this )- which will help understand the anticipated image of the black hole tomorrow.” Do watch it today, though, as it is Mueller’s guess about what the photo will look like based on the principles of physics. It also explains the connection between the image and the Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Remember to send in your good wildlife photos. The tank doesn’t fill itself!
We have two contributors today, the first being Tim Anderson from Oz, who sent us both an astronomy photo and an animal photo. First the critters, one of the rare moth species that migrate.
A pair of migrating bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) taking a breather in my backyard on their way to the Snowy Mountains. Bogong moths gather in the Australian Alps in enormous congregations over the Australian summer. They provided an important protein source for the indigenous people, who would travel large distances to feast on roasted bogongs.
I am told that roasted bogong moth tastes of moth.
NGC3114 is an open star cluster adjacent to the Carina Nebula in the Southern Milky Way. This picture was composed by combining sixty 30-second colour images taken through a 127mm refracting telescope.
Diana MacPherson sent two pictures on February 2.
Here are some bird pictures from this morning. The male & female cardinal have been hanging around the feeders & a few days ago I actually saw two male cardinals sitting in a bush with a blue jay in between!
Reader Jon sent me the link to this NASA video of “Earthrise”, first seen on this day in 1968. I’ll just put up Jon’s comment and the reconstructed video, based on both photos and analyses of where the spacecraft was when Earthrise was seen. In fact, I’m posting this at the exact time when Earthrise began on December 24.
In a video entitled “Earthrise in 4K” NASA recreated the moment when the Apollo 8 astronauts first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon on December 24, 1968. They used current photo mosaics and elevation data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to determine the exact location and orientation of the capsule. “Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of “A Man on the Moon,” sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.”
Remember when Ander’s spotted Earthrise and Frank Borman joked, “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.”?
As Chaikin points out at the end of the video, this year the International Astronomical Union commemorated the event by renaming a twenty-five mile diameter crater visible in the Earthrise photograph “Anders’ Earthrise.”
Today we have some photos from reader Don McCrady, whose work hasn’t appeared here for a while. These are some of 5,000 photos he took on a recent trip to Namibia, and we’re promised more. Don’s captions are indented.
Here are a few shots of some of the wildlife we could see at the Erindi Private Game Reserve in Namibia. For the wildlife shots I used a Canon EOS 7D Mark II with a 150-600mm lens. For my landscapes and astrophotos, I used a Canon EOS 6D and a 14mm lens.
A Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) was sunning itself near the water edge at the Camp Elephant waterhole, and very thoughtfully smiled for my camera.
The waterhole also had some lovely bird species. Here are a Lilac-Breasted Roller (Coracias caudatus) and a Purple Roller(Coracias naevius):
Out on a self-drive tour of the park we spotted many interesting herbivores, here are just two of them, a warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) and an Angolan giraffe(Giraffa giraffa angolensis):
This last animal shot is not super-impressive, but it is—by far—one of the most dangerous shot I’ve ever taken. (I’ll send another dangerous shot in another post.) Our goal was to shoot the Milky Way over a waterhole and capture some of the wildlife in the shot. As you can see from this shot, I was only partially successful.
To get the shot, we drove out into the middle of the Erindi Private Game Reserve, accompanied by a guide wielding a shotgun. When we got there, we did a spotlight sweep for any dangerous animals, and finding nothing there, we proceeded to set up our cameras, compose our shots, and wait to see what happened.
We stood there in total silence and in absolute darkness. Every ten minutes, the guide would sweep the area with a spotlight to see if anything was creeping up on us. When the coast was clear we would wait again, sweep, and repeat. We did this for over an hour, with no wildlife to fill up our shot.
Then, the guide announced he would start another sweep. The spotlight roamed around and then behind me it froze. There in the spotlight was a black rhinoceros, not 20 meters away from me (!!!), and nothing in between him and me. Nobody heard him approach. If he’d decided to charge me it would have been my end, but the rhino, spooked from the light, veered around our vehicle, and eventually wandered into the waterhole area.
This is the best I could get from that night. Someone from our group illuminated the rhino for a brief period of time during my 18 second exposure, and you can see him in this shot. He is very noisy and blurry because he was moving nervously.
Very soon after taking this shot, our guide very calmly told us to all get back on the bus, leaving our cameras and stuff outside. He had detected a herd of elephants incoming and genuinely feared for our safety. Once on the bus, our cameras were one-by-one passed back into the vehicle and we prepared to depart. As our vehicle’s lights went on, we saw a giant herd of elephants approaching the waterhole, and another group from the other direction. Once again, we never heard them coming.
Looking back, if a rhino and a herd of elephants could sneak up on us without making a sound, we wouldn’t have stood a chance against a lion. Oh, and yes there were lions roaming freely around the park.
I just got an email from reader Rick Longworth about Chicago and Mars. His notes:
I thought of you, Jerry, while flying over your amazing city.
Flying from Houston, TX to Grand Rapids, MI, we overflew Chicago and saw the Red Planet in the eastern sky. Of all the millions of people down there, how many noticed Mars at close approach? For anyone who hasn’t seen it check it out sometime this month before it fades back into a pinprick.
I’m sure, if you’re in the U.S., you’ll know all about the eclipse next Monday, which reaches totality between 10:30 am and 3;30 pm, depending on where you are. If you want to see what the eclipse will look like from where you are (enter your ZIP code), go to this site. This is what we’ll see in Chicago, with the peak being at 1:18 pm. I’m fervently hoping that it’s not cloudy, even though the darkness will be fully perceptible in that case.
A Wired video about the eclipse:
Here’s NASA’s map of the path of totality, which shows Chicago getting about 87%%:
If you’re going to see it, and you should (there won’t be another total solar eclipse in the US until 2024, but go here to see all the worldwide total eclipses until 2067 (there are 32).
And NEVER look at the Sun during an eclipse—I’m serious. You can seriously damage your retinas. You can buy special eclipse glasses, which I’m wearing below, and if they’re good ones, they’ll completely occlude your vision unless you’re looking at the sun. Make sure the “ISO” symbol is on them, as that’s the important certification (I’m not sure what ISO actually stands for, but I’m sure a nice reader will tell us). If you haven’t ordered them, Space.com says you can buy ISO certified glasses at these stores:
7-Eleven
Best Buy
Bi-Mart
Casey’s General Store
Circle K
HobbyTown
Kirkland’s
Kroger
London Drugs
Love’s Travel Stops
Lowe’s
Maverik
McDonald’s (Oregon only)
Pilot/Flying J
Toys R Us
Walmart
Have fun! Thanks to Casey for providing me with my glasses.
