Event Horizon Telescope captures ‘beautiful’ images of second black hole’s jet
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
The team multiple times used terms like we have "visual evidence", "photons" and "telescopes" when referring to their radio telescopes.
They did something great, no doubt about it. Still, as we confront other science challenges like demonstrating safety of vaccines, evidence for human impact on the planet and as it causes global warming, I do not think science teams should push that much the use of certain words and concepts in the context of making their work more accessible. Its demeaning to the "general public" who actually is probably quite well educated and does not need these word plays.
They scanned the sky using an existing technique ( VLBI ), processed the data through a series of very innovative and smart data algorithms and created a synthetic image using these libraries:
https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
Then, the data was given to four different teams who come up with 4 different "blackhole pictures". Then they averaged it and published their "photo" while calling it "visual evidence", their words not mine.
As these libraries have different color profiles ...
https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORM...
they could have gone for the violet profile ;-) But then they would have more difficulty calling it the "blackhole photo" instead of what it is: A synthetic image that it is made from 230 Ghz radio data and very smart statistic inference algorithms. Naturally using the yellow color tone it easier to call it a "blackhole picture". It looks like something in Space...
No science journalist questioned them on that, and now they are getting even more "creative" with their imaging techniques:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xxlarg...
They could have just said: We measured the size of the shadow, plus or minus, and we "think" its a blackhole but it could also be other object in the universe that looks like this. As they had to admit here at 1h.00.45 in reply to a question:
"What other objects in the universe could look like this?"
Another level of fun, is that little in space is really yellow. As blackbody radiators (most stars) don't do yellow. The "Sun is yellow" misconception (eliding "relative to a very-not-white whitepoint of blue Vega") is so common, even the ten-ish most used intro astronomy college textbooks get it wrong.
Sometimes science's motivating deterrence of getting things wrong being embarrassing, applies also to education and outreach content. As with a few good intro physics textbooks. Or a marine biologist writing a children's picture book, and being seriously concerned about getting something wrong in front of their research peers. But sometimes, not so much. The astronomy community in particular seems notably unembarrassed by aphysically-creative handling of color and visual representations in education and outreach. Perhaps because it has so little overlap with the research endeavor?