— Roberto Alonso González Lezcano (@robertoglezcano) April 26, 2019
Proud mum.Yosemite Forbidden Pool.I don’t seem to have one in my garden this year.Skye.Munguin Towers grounds are coming back to life
.
Mombasa.Nature reclaims.You taking a photograph?Where Munguin takes his leisure, while Tris sweats and toils.Dad looks a bit cross!!!Arc de Triomphe et les Grandes Avenues.Munguin’s Patio.I found a stone to stand on, Mum.Visitors?Besties.A work in progress…Munguin’s Secret Garden.Nature reclaims what is hers (or his).Biting my nails? Me? Yeah, well, maybe a bit.
Really enjoyed the views of the lawns and gardens of Munguin Towers! Not generally open to the public I suppose. 😉
Never nothing not to like about Yosemite of course! And Skye too!
An update on the black hole picture posted a couple of weeks ago, and a couple of items from last week’s science news:
Munguin’s readers doubtless noticed that the image of the black hole in the galaxy M87 was described as being tiny — requiring a telescope which can resolve the angular diameter of the black hole event horizon which is only 42 + or- 3 microseconds of arc. But the black hole is nevertheless described as being “supermassive.” Just how supermassive it is can be visualized by comparing its diameter to the diameter of the solar system, and to the current position of the Voyager I space probe, which is far beyond the solar system in interstellar space at a distance from the earth that’s more than three times the radius of Pluto’s orbit.
From “ScienceAlert” dated last Friday:
Update on the rate of expansion of the universe. The most recent precise measurements of the Hubble Constant, based on direct measurement of high redshift galaxies, give a value in round numbers of 74 kilometers per second per Megaparsec. This compares with a value of 67.4 (in the same units) as measured some years ago by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, based on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (big bang) radiation and the theoretical expansion model. A crisis in cosmology! Perhaps indicating a problem with the expansion model and the properties of Dark Energy and/or Dark Matter.
An atom of Xenon-124 has been observed to undergo radioactive decay by double-electron capture — one of the rarest events in nature — indicating a radioactive half life of 1.8 x 10^22 YEARS……….which is on the order of a TRILLION times the age of the universe. (An age of the universe BTW which is about 9% less than previously calculated if the Hubble Constant is 74 instead of 67.4)
That was all a tad too complex for this non-STEM mind. Munguin, for his part is still digesting it.
The grounds aren’t at present open to the public, but he was wondering about proceeding with that, as it would make a bit of spare cash, and after all Tris has plenty of spare time.
Tris……I can see great demand for tours of the Munguin Towers gardens.
With MNR’s prominent natural science profile in zoology, botany, horticulture, environmental science, etc, I’m sure that there’s great demand for some physics of current interest. No doubt the cosmological crisis regarding the size of the Hubble Constant is a matter of great public concern. 😉
I tell you Danny… there are people queuing up to hear what Munguin thinks about the size of the Hubble Constant. We have to turn them away at the door sometimes.
(The introduction of a small charge should solve that problem.)
I’d not thought, until now, of MNR being a site of scientific interest… Hmmmm. 🙂
Seriously though, although I’m pretty dim when it comes to matters scientific, I know that many of Munguin’s more learned readers are not.
Douglas…….Andromeda is indeed a beautiful galaxy……as you know, the most distant object in the universe visible to the naked eye. Yes, it really would be nice if it were a lot brighter and those spiral arms larger than the moon could be seen without a telescope. And too bad the black hole at the center is apparently too small to be resolved, even by a virtual VLBI telescope the size of the earth. 🙂
That seems small Danny! But distance lends enchantment, though it has never worked for me! What is the gravitational pull of Sagittarius A* , the putative black hole at the centre of our own galaxy compared to it? When will we get, if ever, an image of that!
Frankly I think all galaxies above a certain minima will pull materiel into a central core. The putative black hole at the centre of a galaxy. All of them will become super massive given sufficient time, and time past we have a lot of. Is what we are imaging supposed to be the central black hole of M87, or summat else?
Douglas……..as I understand it, astronomers and astrophysicists are in general agreement (from black hole theory and galaxy formation theory) that a massive black hole (and not just a gravitationally large accumulation of conventional matter) is at the center of most if not all good sized galaxies. That’s one of the reasons that this first image was so important, in that it was in such fine agreement with computer simulations that were made based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This was not only a triumph for astronomy, it was one more triumph for Einstein and General Relativity. Albert’s great theory of gravity has triumphed again and again for more than 100 years.
I found a couple of articles (below) that explain in some considerable detail how the picture was made, how well it agreed with the theory and computer simulations, and why astronomers were not successful (in this first try) in imaging Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way (due to insufficient signal-to-noise ratio in the data.) Sagittarius A* is smaller than the M87 black hole, but it has a larger angular diameter as viewed from earth due to its much closer distance (25,000 Light-Years for Sagittarius A* verses more than 50 MILLION Light-Years for M87.)
One article states three conditions that must be met to get an image:
1) You have to have the right resolution, meaning that your telescope (or telescope array) needs to see the object you’re viewing as more than a single pixel.
2) You need a galaxy that’s radio-loud, meaning that it emits a radio background that’s sufficiently strong to actually stand out against the silhouette of the event horizon.
3) And you need a galaxy that’s radio-transparent, meaning that you can actually see all the way to the black hole without being confounded by foreground radio signals.
BTW, radio astronomy is used because the accretion disks of black holes are generally strong radio emitters (due to radio frequency synchrotron radiation from in-falling charged particles,) which is adaptable to very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI.) VLBI is not suitable for optical wavelengths. (This true even though the much longer wavelength of radio waves requires a much bigger telescope aperture than optical wavelengths to achieve a given level of angular resolution.)
M87 met these criteria spectacularly. It appears that the problem with Saggitarius A* is that the background is insufficiently radio-loud. It’s just not “bright” enough to see the contrasting shadow of the black hole event horizon. There are also problems with the next two closest black hole candidates for imaging. The third largest black hole as would be seen from the earth is the one at the center of NGC 1277, which is large enough to be resolved, but the galaxy background is radio-quiet. So there’s not enough bright background to see the silhouette. Finally, the black hole at the center of nearby M31, NGC 224, (Andromeda), is too small to be resolved by VLBI using the Event Horizon Telescope network in its present configuration.
Grieg……LOL……Your comment reminds me of Bertrand Russell. (You may wish to ignore this. 😉 )
At the level of pure mathematical logic, the concepts of 1 and 2 and the mathematical operations that can be performed on them is no simple matter. In Principia Mathematica, their landmark three-volume treatise (1910-1913) which develops mathematics from foundational logical principles, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell famously took 360 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. This paragraph is typical, and clearly comes before the concept of addition was established:
Bertrand Russell came from a prominent aristocratic family that went back to Tudor times, and he lived to old age. Among his stellar acquaintances were Robert Browning and Tennyson, and he is said to have had an aunt who danced with Napoleon.
Stephen Fry describes an encounter with Alistair Cooke:
“When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, ‘This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.’
‘Wow!’ I said, duly impressed.
‘No, No,’ said Cooke, ‘It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell’s aunt danced with Napoleon. That’s how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.”
loved the stripy horses – so sweet and the elephants. What is it about baby ellies that make them so cute?
May I congratulate you on Munguin Towers – it’s coming long very nicely indeed. Spring has indeed sprung. As for Robin, perhaps he’s on holiday as I’ve two visiting me at the moment. One skinny and one very fat. I think we know which one is doing best on the foraging hunt.
Tris – I think that designed properly and without fish, they’re essential in gardens. With fish (that scoff everything living) they’re more of an ornamental drinking trough.
When I put my first wildlife pond in 30 years ago I imported 6 Palmate newts from my friends pond in Peebles. They have, over the years populated the immediate vicinity and are now a common sight in all the surrounding gardens.
I think I used to be on the flight path of a pigeon race because once a year the racing pigeons used to land at my pond for a drink. They were completely tame as you’d expect and my presence didn’t bother them at all. One even walked into my utility room one evening, jumped up onto the worktop and settled in for the night. I set my alarm for sunrise, opened the door and off it went. I don’t know anybody who keeps pigeons these days.
A couple of the neighbours have since put ponds in and we now have a very healthy amphibian population.
I’m currently trying out a solar powered aeration kit to see if I can clear the pond quicker without using any of the supposed harmless concoctions currently on offer. It’s usually about mid – late June before it clears at present.
Sounds great. How much do you charge pigeons for bed and breakfast? 🙂
My pond is really tiny. The small size from Dobbies, so I’m unsure about intorducing wildlife, like Newts (although I’d love them. I also worry about the cats in the area which already seem to find my garden s great place to chase birds, defecate and generally be a pain in the bottom.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
I see you have a stepladder.
Do you still see your real ladder…?
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I’m sure Tris rung him the other day.
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I think they are rarely more than a few steps away from each other.
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Ohhhh PP.
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Ouch, andi.
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Oh, very good!!!
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Really enjoyed the views of the lawns and gardens of Munguin Towers! Not generally open to the public I suppose. 😉
Never nothing not to like about Yosemite of course! And Skye too!
An update on the black hole picture posted a couple of weeks ago, and a couple of items from last week’s science news:
Munguin’s readers doubtless noticed that the image of the black hole in the galaxy M87 was described as being tiny — requiring a telescope which can resolve the angular diameter of the black hole event horizon which is only 42 + or- 3 microseconds of arc. But the black hole is nevertheless described as being “supermassive.” Just how supermassive it is can be visualized by comparing its diameter to the diameter of the solar system, and to the current position of the Voyager I space probe, which is far beyond the solar system in interstellar space at a distance from the earth that’s more than three times the radius of Pluto’s orbit.
From “ScienceAlert” dated last Friday:
Update on the rate of expansion of the universe. The most recent precise measurements of the Hubble Constant, based on direct measurement of high redshift galaxies, give a value in round numbers of 74 kilometers per second per Megaparsec. This compares with a value of 67.4 (in the same units) as measured some years ago by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, based on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (big bang) radiation and the theoretical expansion model. A crisis in cosmology! Perhaps indicating a problem with the expansion model and the properties of Dark Energy and/or Dark Matter.
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-measurements-of-the-expansion-of-the-universe-confirm-something-is-definitely-awry
Also from “ScienceAlert” and also dated Friday:
An atom of Xenon-124 has been observed to undergo radioactive decay by double-electron capture — one of the rarest events in nature — indicating a radioactive half life of 1.8 x 10^22 YEARS……….which is on the order of a TRILLION times the age of the universe. (An age of the universe BTW which is about 9% less than previously calculated if the Hubble Constant is 74 instead of 67.4)
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-dark-matter-detector-just-detected-one-of-the-rarest-events-ever-in-science
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That was all a tad too complex for this non-STEM mind. Munguin, for his part is still digesting it.
The grounds aren’t at present open to the public, but he was wondering about proceeding with that, as it would make a bit of spare cash, and after all Tris has plenty of spare time.
🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Tris……I can see great demand for tours of the Munguin Towers gardens.
With MNR’s prominent natural science profile in zoology, botany, horticulture, environmental science, etc, I’m sure that there’s great demand for some physics of current interest. No doubt the cosmological crisis regarding the size of the Hubble Constant is a matter of great public concern. 😉
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I tell you Danny… there are people queuing up to hear what Munguin thinks about the size of the Hubble Constant. We have to turn them away at the door sometimes.
(The introduction of a small charge should solve that problem.)
I’d not thought, until now, of MNR being a site of scientific interest… Hmmmm. 🙂
Seriously though, although I’m pretty dim when it comes to matters scientific, I know that many of Munguin’s more learned readers are not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, nothing like a fee to stamp out overdemand……LOL.
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LOL. I’ve always found that, Danny!
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trispw,
“I’d not thought, until now, of MNR being a site of scientific interest… Hmmmm. 🙂”
Well, Danny and I are having fun.
My screen saver remains his picture of the Andromeda Galaxy at full scale, though enhanced lightways a tad. It was a bit of a revelation for me!
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Ah well… there are things, Douglas, that go right above my head!! 🙂
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Douglas…….Andromeda is indeed a beautiful galaxy……as you know, the most distant object in the universe visible to the naked eye. Yes, it really would be nice if it were a lot brighter and those spiral arms larger than the moon could be seen without a telescope. And too bad the black hole at the center is apparently too small to be resolved, even by a virtual VLBI telescope the size of the earth. 🙂
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Maybe we could send the Maybot and the Orange Idiot to photograph it more closely?
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Tris…….Works for me!…..LOL.
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That seems small Danny! But distance lends enchantment, though it has never worked for me! What is the gravitational pull of Sagittarius A* , the putative black hole at the centre of our own galaxy compared to it? When will we get, if ever, an image of that!
Frankly I think all galaxies above a certain minima will pull materiel into a central core. The putative black hole at the centre of a galaxy. All of them will become super massive given sufficient time, and time past we have a lot of. Is what we are imaging supposed to be the central black hole of M87, or summat else?
Just asking.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Douglas……..as I understand it, astronomers and astrophysicists are in general agreement (from black hole theory and galaxy formation theory) that a massive black hole (and not just a gravitationally large accumulation of conventional matter) is at the center of most if not all good sized galaxies. That’s one of the reasons that this first image was so important, in that it was in such fine agreement with computer simulations that were made based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This was not only a triumph for astronomy, it was one more triumph for Einstein and General Relativity. Albert’s great theory of gravity has triumphed again and again for more than 100 years.
I found a couple of articles (below) that explain in some considerable detail how the picture was made, how well it agreed with the theory and computer simulations, and why astronomers were not successful (in this first try) in imaging Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way (due to insufficient signal-to-noise ratio in the data.) Sagittarius A* is smaller than the M87 black hole, but it has a larger angular diameter as viewed from earth due to its much closer distance (25,000 Light-Years for Sagittarius A* verses more than 50 MILLION Light-Years for M87.)
One article states three conditions that must be met to get an image:
1) You have to have the right resolution, meaning that your telescope (or telescope array) needs to see the object you’re viewing as more than a single pixel.
2) You need a galaxy that’s radio-loud, meaning that it emits a radio background that’s sufficiently strong to actually stand out against the silhouette of the event horizon.
3) And you need a galaxy that’s radio-transparent, meaning that you can actually see all the way to the black hole without being confounded by foreground radio signals.
BTW, radio astronomy is used because the accretion disks of black holes are generally strong radio emitters (due to radio frequency synchrotron radiation from in-falling charged particles,) which is adaptable to very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI.) VLBI is not suitable for optical wavelengths. (This true even though the much longer wavelength of radio waves requires a much bigger telescope aperture than optical wavelengths to achieve a given level of angular resolution.)
M87 met these criteria spectacularly. It appears that the problem with Saggitarius A* is that the background is insufficiently radio-loud. It’s just not “bright” enough to see the contrasting shadow of the black hole event horizon. There are also problems with the next two closest black hole candidates for imaging. The third largest black hole as would be seen from the earth is the one at the center of NGC 1277, which is large enough to be resolved, but the galaxy background is radio-quiet. So there’s not enough bright background to see the silhouette. Finally, the black hole at the center of nearby M31, NGC 224, (Andromeda), is too small to be resolved by VLBI using the Event Horizon Telescope network in its present configuration.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/04/10/black-holes-are-real-and-spectacular-and-so-are-their-event-horizons/#36ec83143f34
https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-picture-explained-2019-4
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Yes, yes, yes, this black hole, galaxy stuff is all very well, but can someone please tell me where 1 ends and 2 begins?
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Grieg……LOL……Your comment reminds me of Bertrand Russell. (You may wish to ignore this. 😉 )
At the level of pure mathematical logic, the concepts of 1 and 2 and the mathematical operations that can be performed on them is no simple matter. In Principia Mathematica, their landmark three-volume treatise (1910-1913) which develops mathematics from foundational logical principles, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell famously took 360 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. This paragraph is typical, and clearly comes before the concept of addition was established:
https://www.storyofmathematics.com/20th_russell.html
Bertrand Russell came from a prominent aristocratic family that went back to Tudor times, and he lived to old age. Among his stellar acquaintances were Robert Browning and Tennyson, and he is said to have had an aunt who danced with Napoleon.
Stephen Fry describes an encounter with Alistair Cooke:
“When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, ‘This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.’
‘Wow!’ I said, duly impressed.
‘No, No,’ said Cooke, ‘It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell’s aunt danced with Napoleon. That’s how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.”
Russell describes Tennyson and Browning:
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LOL Danny… It makes one feel very insignificant if one doesn’t have an aunt of some sort who danced with Napoleon.
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LOL…….Great song! Not quite Napoleon, but still…….. 😉
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Well, we can’t have everything…
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The artificial island rang a bell with me, so a quick Google later I found it to be the SS City of Adelaide, built (where else) on the Clyde in 1863.
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So much was built on the Clyde… and not so song ago, so much was promised for the Clyde.
Alas… you should never believe UKOK promises.
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It made a nice planter though.
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LOL yes.
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loved the stripy horses – so sweet and the elephants. What is it about baby ellies that make them so cute?
May I congratulate you on Munguin Towers – it’s coming long very nicely indeed. Spring has indeed sprung. As for Robin, perhaps he’s on holiday as I’ve two visiting me at the moment. One skinny and one very fat. I think we know which one is doing best on the foraging hunt.
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Well, I reckon baby anythings are cute, but you’re right… there’s something special about the wee trunked animals.
I wonder if your robins are a male and female. They are fiercely territorial. It’s unusual to see two together unless they are a couple.
Of course, maybe your grounds are rather larger than those of Munguin!
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The adult orangutan were lovely but for those of you missing the younger ones
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Fabulous…
Big shout out to the people who look after and train these babies.
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That was beautiful.
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Bloody hell, I liked my self again! How narcisistic or daft is that!
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Just give yourself a round of applause…
We all do it. 🙂
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It’s Dippy the dinosaur’s last weekend in Glasgow and Wee Rebellion, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion came to mark the day.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-48078039
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Bit late for poor old Dippy… 🙂
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That bit of lawn in front of the seat looks like it needs a wee pond Tris.
The wildlife will love it and so will you.
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The pond is a little farther up the garden. There are also dishes of water for washing and drinking placed strategically all over the place.
The pond is small, but I do see birds washing in it and drinking from it. And occasionally have to rescue a drowning beetle!
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Tris – I think that designed properly and without fish, they’re essential in gardens. With fish (that scoff everything living) they’re more of an ornamental drinking trough.
When I put my first wildlife pond in 30 years ago I imported 6 Palmate newts from my friends pond in Peebles. They have, over the years populated the immediate vicinity and are now a common sight in all the surrounding gardens.
I think I used to be on the flight path of a pigeon race because once a year the racing pigeons used to land at my pond for a drink. They were completely tame as you’d expect and my presence didn’t bother them at all. One even walked into my utility room one evening, jumped up onto the worktop and settled in for the night. I set my alarm for sunrise, opened the door and off it went. I don’t know anybody who keeps pigeons these days.
A couple of the neighbours have since put ponds in and we now have a very healthy amphibian population.
I’m currently trying out a solar powered aeration kit to see if I can clear the pond quicker without using any of the supposed harmless concoctions currently on offer. It’s usually about mid – late June before it clears at present.
I find it all very interesting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sounds great. How much do you charge pigeons for bed and breakfast? 🙂
My pond is really tiny. The small size from Dobbies, so I’m unsure about intorducing wildlife, like Newts (although I’d love them. I also worry about the cats in the area which already seem to find my garden s great place to chase birds, defecate and generally be a pain in the bottom.
Any advice?
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