The first simulated image of a black hole, calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978
The first simulated image of a black hole, calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978
18 comments
That’s quite accurate to what we think now a black hole looks like, wow!
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Possibly my favorite data plot ever. The amount of work doing all the dots by hand is insane.
Reddit user /u/rantonels has made a really cool [real time raytracer](https://rantonels.github.io/starless/#) where you can look at a render of a black hole yourself and compare it with Luminet’s work.
It looks like Gargantua! This guy was ahead of his time.
Where’s Mathew McConaughey?
This strongly reminds me of the graphics of Return of the Obra Dinn.
It run in Fortran?
Is the iphone more powerful than the computer mentioned?
Why is there a single isolated line that seems to go through the inner part of the black hole?
Is it to do with gravitational harmonics or something?
I can’t imagine the time it took to plot every single point and paint it
man i wish we could see a recreation of the code in assembly so it could be redone at a higher resolution
Ok, so why is one side lit up and not the other?
Is that due to the prevailing rotation of the light particles?
Why is the lower half of the black hole obscured by light?
A buddy of mine worked at the IRAM 30m ‘scope (one of several in the EHT network) just outside of town when the first actual image was made.
what annoys me… as a kid I was fascinated by black holes following the movie of the same name. I actively started looking for information… libraries, school, science teacher… aside from a crude picture book, found zip. Not only that… was dissuaded to spend much more time on it. I learned far more about humans than black holes.
Interestingly, that one book talked about white holes and the theory they were an ‘exit point’ for black hole ingested matter/energy. Apparently this is an idea back in serious consideration again after decades of thinking it was an indicator of how poor that first book I found was.
Also imagine how the creator of this rendering felt once we finally saw the real thing.
Side note, I know quite a few physicists.. particle and astro. There seems to be a distinct trend that these people have an extremely strong artistic element to their personalities. I can’t think of one that didn’t have an interest from being in a band, to painting…. there is some serious left/right brain stuff going on here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Luminet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Luminet)
Like the eye of Ra.
Wait so the whole thing about the Interstellar movie being the first to create an accurate image of a black hole is bs?
There’s something wrong with the picture. I can’t see the black hole.
It’s hard to imagine between this graphic effort where Luminet and his team had to punch god know how many cards without any mistakes and put it to computer in certain order to represent black hole using computer which doesn’t have even a monitor and original Doom shooter from 1993 which require literally a couple magnitudes more calculation power for pure entertaiment is exacly 15 years of difference.