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How to Understand What Black Holes Look Like

Veritasium · 11M views · 2019-04-09 · 9:19

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Overview

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

On Hacker News

Recommended for correctly predicting the features of the real black hole image and clearly explaining the lensing physics behind it.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2019–2021

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysicsFundamental physics
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black holesgravitational lensingaccretion diskevent horizon telescopem87

What people said

turshija · 2019-04 · Strong recommendation

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. [VIDEO]

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gus_massa · 2021-08 · Recommendation

If the black hole is not spinning, it should look the same from every angle. A spinning black hole is deformed (like the spinning Earth.) Anyway, we are not seeing the black hole (because it looks just like a black circle in front of a black background). The interesting part of the image is a disk of material spinning around it. There is a nice 3d cardboard simulation and clear explanation in a video by Veritasium [VIDEO]

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sudhirj · 2019-09 · Recommendation

There's a clearer explanation of why the disk looks that way and how the gravitational warp makes those light paths [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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