Why I love Dr. Becky: 1. Knowledge...she knows her stuff 2. Enthusiasm...you can tell she loves what she does 3. Curiosity...you can see she is always learning 4. Example ...she is the perfect role model for young people interested in STEM 5. Cute...as a button.

Dr Becky.... Thanks for making all this technical material all the more approachable. Your enthusiasm for the topic is evident.

I cried when they released this picture!! I still have it saved to my camera roll. What an incredible accomplishment to have taken that picture!

Yeeessss! Finally a video that really puts this into perspective. Not only did you explain why the image looks the way it does but you also explained why so many people are so absolutely ecstatic about this image. I’m still in awe that humanity has imaged a freaking *black hole*. Also loved the Black Hole song at the end. You’ve clearly derived the formula for country music. Publish!

Becky is my hero ! I was never interested in Astrophysics and now probably my next project in data science would be somewhere around understanding of quantum gravity.

I really enjoy Dr. Becky’s style of teaching. I was majoring in astrophysics years ago and I loved it, but one day, the dean pulled me in and told me that I wasn’t good enough to be hired as an astronomer. He said I was good, but since the competition to be a full time astronomer is so fierce , I should consider being an engineer. That was some of the best advice I ever received. I now work in the space program. It’s people like Dr. Becky that I’m in awe of. Not only intelligent, but also very capable of teaching others.

Finally, I've been avoiding all the other channels and articles waiting for this video to hear from you Dr. Becky. Now I have my bedtime story, just need to come home first :-) Thank you for making time to do this for us.

My best friend was a physicist and we would stay up all night talking about black holes and galaxies forming and gravity, but he died. I really like your channel because it sort of fills a small part of that void. Also that sneeze was much smaller than the build up made it seem...... :p

I love that professional astrophysicists use XKCD's visualization of the scale of M87*.

You did so well on channel 4 news and I think the presenter genuinely enjoyed interviewing you. Well done

Dr Becky I'm not an astrophysicist, but I do enjoy the fruits of their and your labors. I was extremely excited when the pictures first came out. I also am aware of how friggin difficult it was and what these pics meant. You have my undying respect for your work. Cheers!

Thanks for taking the time to do this properly. Wayyy too many videos on YT about this have come out since last week, yours is the first one I've watched. Really don't mind waiting!

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour" Thank you Dr. Becky for linking Messier 87 with a poem by William Blake in an earlier video. It's a fitting frame of mind for the vast human and cosmic scales behind the image of M87*

Thank you so much for uploading this video. It is helping me to get through the pandemic!

I had no idea you have your own channel. I'd only seen you on Brady's channel(s) It's cool to see your personality and excitement about a big moment in science. Thanks for the information. I'm glad there are so many working scientists who want to share with the public.

Every time I see the scale of the black hole my mind kind of melts, it is just so large, and we are so painfully small. Great video, thank you so much for taking the time to make it :)

THANK you for the 5 TIMESTAMPS in the notes for each reason!!!

Love this video. You did the best job of explaining what we are seeing in the picture. Thank you and keep up the good work.

That sneeze was legit the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Wow. Einstein was way too beyond his time.

This is a great video. I'm enjoying going thru your archives. This video answered a couple of questions I had, or didn't even know I had until you brought up a topic and answered right away or gave a theory to. Thanks for that! In particular the jets coming from the black hole. What a wonderous time for science.

Excellent teaching. You're the only one among a multitude of experts to superimpose a sketch of solar system including voyager for size comparison!! M87 is scary huge!!

Very interesting! I just found your channel while watching videos about the black hole. I'm definitely subscribing! I very much enjoyed your animated style. I can see that you are very enthusiastic about the material, which is contagious! Thanks you! Have a great day! 😊💕👍👍

This is a great video, especially the "human" aspects at the end. I guess Astrophysicists are like real people that sneeze too! My hope is that kids will watch this and see themselves learning about how the Universe works like you are doing, or figuring out the techniques and materials to do these things, or otherwise expanding the field of human knowledge.

I've had more of my questions about black holes answered in 15 minutes through your video than in years of watching different documentaries about the subject. Thank you! It's insane how these documentaries just repeat the same basic information ad nauseam and for example never even mention exactly HOW they think the jets contribute to star formation, they just say they do and that's it.

I'm glad you spent the time to polish your video rather than rushing it out. Was worth the wait :o)

Re: 06:31 "the material in that accretion disc will eventually fall into the black hole". If I remember correctly, I think only around 1/700th of it will fall in, the rest will likely be radiated out as energy (mostly EM and perhaps a tiny fraction as gravitational)

Love your show. Take your time. It's worth it.

Thank you Dr Becky, i do not consider myself very smart but after seeing this in the news, i pondered that the mass black holes swallow even crushed down to nothing was still adding to the size of black holes and this is why they become super massive. Thank you for confirming my thoughts.

That over-the-shoulder thumbnail shot... you’ve learned a lot about production from Brady 😂

Dr. Becky, I've been binge watching your videos over the last week. Thanks so much for the effort and study you put into sharing these concepts with us! Your work inspires me to follow physics and astronomy more closely. I have a decent background in Newtonian physics due to my work as an accident reconstructionist (using time/distance, momentum equations and the like) to piece together serious injury and fatal vehicle accidents. However, what you are sharing want me to move further with my education and work within education or research fields. Can't wait to see more!

love her enthusiastic talks

What's amazing of this picture is that for all intents and purposes it could've been just a point or disk of light, like a regular star, proving a flaw in the GR Theory. But no, there is a clear depiction of a black disk, depicting the event horizon and cementing the GR Theory for good.

Hi Dr Becky! Your wonderful personality shines through as always. As an Uncle to 7 girls I'd like to thank you for being such a wonderful role-modelfor alll the young ladies out there with a passion for science. If I may ask a question, what is your take on the Electric Universe theories? There does seem to be something to it. Plasma cosmology has had quite a few predictions that turned out to be correct. Thanks for your time and I look forward to next vid :)

I'm not disappointed that your's is a week later. There were some excellent early vids that talk about the pic and why it looks the way it does (I like Veritasium's best). No need to compete with those. I like that you were able to take a step back and talk about why it's important. Yes, we all knew that Einstein nailed it, but some of the other reasons are really interesting. I didn't think about that it gives information about how black holes grow and interact with their environment. The ability to use that data to test simulations is *huge*! Thanks for digging past the headlines!

I’m glad I discovered this channel. Cheers, Dr. Becky

It took me a while to appreciate how this picture tells a story of two blacks - outside the accretion disk is stellar void, while its inner edge dances insanely around another darkness, an ominous one this time that hides the story of truth we do not know. Thank you for the story behind this picture!

The waiting definitely paid off, despite having known about a few of these points. I didn't know about the twisted magnetic fields, for example, so today I already learned something new during breakfast! ;-) Also I really like the picture before the actual video! :-) (oh, and never stop putting outtakes at the end, seeing you singing some astrophysical lyrics is gorgeous!

Wow This is a wonderful explanation of the relevance of this famous "picture". I do believe this cosmically beautiful coincidence of being alive in 2019, due to all the discoveries humankind is making in astrophysics, is not only amazing in itself but is also vital for the knowledge that future generations will be able to use to understand how and why this universe works the way it does, to discover the real meaning of the mysteries that surround us and the ones that we have not even thought about. By the way, just by watching this entire video I know I love your channel, so you just gained one more subscriber. I deeply appreciate that you take the time to spread this kind of knowledge, for it helps me understand more about what is my biggest passion: astrophysics. I am currently a freshman in Physics and hope to be as knowledgeable as you when I get my master's degree in astrophysics in some years from now. It would be a pleasure to meet you and talk to you in person some day. Greetings from Costa Rica! :D

Having arrived late to the game, I don't have the luxury of watching this in sequence - I'm struck watching this and discussion of gravity and Einstein at the contrast with your interview at CERN with one of the particle physicists and he said in the context of the Standard Model and work to be done, that "we don't do anything with gravity - it's just too weak."

Brilliant summary of last week's exciting news.. thank you Dr Becky!

Audio is great here. Thanks for putting this together.

Beautifully explained.

16:20, Bless you! As for the rest, interesting video, the physics of black holes is just mind bending!

That picture of the black hole reminded me when the Voyager 1and 2 images were released! The awe and wonder of seeing something for the first time. Simply awesome!

I subscribed to your channel after seeing you on C4 news last week. You're inspiring me to want to go back an retake A level physics. Keep up the excellent videos.

Thank you for this video and the explanation! I'd love to spend a whole day talking to you and asking questions about the universe... that would be out of this world!

That sneeze was one of the purest things I've ever seen. The rest of the video was great too though. Very dramatic thumbnail!

+1 for the xkcd plug. ;)

Super duper good to see your show!

Dr. Becky, you are one of my Science Heroes.

Sagitarius A Star has a much smaller event horizon than M87 black hole; it's harder to resolve the image even though it's much closer.

Dr Becky, you are my favourite astrophysicist.

The enormity of that Planck Star overwhelms my ability to think properly.

Well done Dr Becky. Your TV appearance was classic. Love your channel. Keep it Up

Really great explanation in terms of detailing and not getting too mathy Looking forward to hearing more of your commentary on new research! :)

I'm a (late) condensed matter physicist and only lightly dabbled in general relativity. But one of my professors once stated that when old things just don't go away, probably it's also because those concepts are very good. So if you think about it, it took about 200+ years to come up with something better than Newtonian mechanics. The General Theory of Relativity was published 1915. It held up pretty good...

Thank you Dr. Becky, very cool!

That image always vaguely reminds me of the _space pods_ from the motion picture *2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY.*

Thanks ive seen a lot of videos of the black hole image and this has been by far the more didactic I’ve seen. Plus it helps having such a beautiful astrophysicist explaining it! Black holes have been always a mistery and still are but now we know for sure their real. On another

Love your little tune at the end. Black hole blues would be a great concept album!

Yeah one of the journal papers released along with the picture as well as John Michael Godier's interview with Dr. Feryal on Event Horizon both mention the timescale variability as the biggest challenge to overcome model wise though other factors particularly that processing the data for M87* apparently got a significant head start as M87 isn't visible from Antarctica so there was no need to wait for the observations at the South Pole Telescope. The latter bit was a surprise to me apparently ALMA as the big game changer for the M87* image, I guess the south pole was mainly needed to view Sag A*?

The inside of the event horizon is beige when looking toward the singularity. If you look at the corner of a room at the intersection of two walls and the ceiling, the singularity looks something like that except the beige walls and beige ceiling with some slight variation in colour are moving past you really fast; faster and faster and faster. It's the scariest thing I've ever experienced. You dread what's about to happen, and the dread just gets worse, accelerating. I don't know if you ever reach the singularity. My consciousness left before that happened. I think it's like dividing something in half over and over again. You never actually reach zero.

Ah, linking xkcd. I see you are a woman of culture as well.

Hi dr. Becky, love your presentations. Have gone back to look at episodes that I have missed. I had a question: Had you ever read the book “Ringworld”. From 1971 and the talk about the radiation wave heading out from the center of the galaxy. SciFy that I thought you might enjoy

Your presentation is just so enjoyable to listen to. I love your channel!

Question: if the image was computed by removing "noise" out of the data and fitting it to a model, how do we know that the black hole actually looks like that and we didn't just overfit it to the models with thought it should look like?

Thank you for the video, Dr. Smethurst. It'll be interesting to see where this takes us. I'm thinking we could make good use of the Lagrange points to build an even BIGGER radio telescope. Imagine the possibilities.

No more cut, not in the budget, not the hair... never =) Fine episode and a great channel. Thank you!

... meanwhile a hobbit in the forest: “Black hole my ass. FRODO!! FROODO!!!”

It fills in my knowledge of the programing involved in data training the interpolation algorithm, which some are trying to scant as "a few lines of code." You don't weigh programming by the pound ;)

Thanks, Dr. Becky! You're a shining light in the chaos of darkness! Keep it up!

Ironically, Katie Bouman's bio pic at MIT is really blurry. Looks like it was taken with her algorith from lightyears away. Great work by her and the team, by the way.

Holy crap! It’s been 2 years already!

Fantastic and fascinating video as always. Also loving the upgraded audio

Excellent video Dr. Becky!

Thank you for explaining this.

Really easy to understand the material, but still with quite a lot of scientific content.

Great post. Thanks Doc!

Cool stuff. The future looks really interesting!

Looks like a plasmoid shooting particle jets. Dig the vid!

Your impression of Michael Collins is the best thing ever! lol :D

Hey Dr. Becky. I've heard that the E-ELT will be equipped with a spectrometer called CODEX that will be able to resolve radial velocity differences as small as 2.5 cm/sec. That's about what you would need to detect an exoplanet of half Earth's mass at the outer edge of the habitable zone of a G0 star (M/Ms=1.05) with an orbital inclination of 45 degrees. In other words, a spectrometer with that resolution would, if the light environment were noiseless, be able to detect most of the potentially habitable planets that orbit observable lower main sequence stars. But is the signal-to-noise ratio really going to be good enough to make that much Doppler resolution useful? The star's rotation will broaden its spectral features by far more than 2.5 cm/sec, and additionally convective motions in the star's photosphere will blur them. (Instead of having clearly defined rotationally broadened edges, the features will "fade out" toward both red and blue.) The Doppler signal might be swamped by Doppler noise. If that's true, then how do the astronomers plan to work around the noise problem? In the best scenario, what would be the probability of detection for an exoplanet, and what would be the probability of false alarm?

Excellent overview.

Thanks for making great educational content and putting it on the internet.

Thanks for your videos. I have a few questions, if I may: 1. if the Sun has 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, what is this fraction for a super massive black hole in respect to its galaxy? 2. If a black hole is so dense that (almost) nothing can escape, do we have a theory of how the Universe "escaped" from the Big Bang singularity which I think was infinitely denser? Thanks, again!

Great video as usual. Thank you for explaining! Goofy question: Is that nail polish "Live Love Polish?" My wife (another awesome woman of science) wears that and it caught my attention as "Hey! That looks really familiar." She watched and guessed it was Felis collection, and Artemis. Given that it is magnetically altered polish, it seems like it would be the sort of thing you might like. :) (I feel a little awkward asking a hardcore science KZfaqr about fashion stuff, but it caught my eye...)

Thank you for the video and perspective.

wikipedia is giving away that you could apply the kerr metric, usually for black holes with angular momentum, to the sun which has mass though no event horizon, and that drags around the object. I did not really go through the math, but since one part of a spherical planet is closer to a sun/black hole. There must be a transfer of rotational energy spinning up the planet.

thx Dr Becky...well done...and audio perfect

These terms also exist on Earth, but they are so small we couldn't really measure them until recently.

I would love to see space based telescopes at Earths Lagrange 4 and 5. This would be an epic scale telescope.

Love the graphic showing how large it was.

Awesome Astrophysicist sneeze too! WOW :-) Great video.

Look at the thumbnail. Smart and giving us looks too!

waited for your comment on the release for some time. glad it is here. it is not much of a discovery and more a confirmation. Discoveries won't the outcome of such a massive effort. I like the idea of getting another release, of "our" supermassive blackhole soon. how do you personally like the choice of fake color used here ? the orange... I question it. would we ever be able to use a blackhole to slighshot light and look back at our planet but in the past? if light cannot escape. it does fall in and increase the energy within the singularity, or does it turn into mass? as there is no speed of light present is mass and energy equal within the blackhole? I would love to find out in the next few decades. I love that the new computational image algorithms will be published. single frame super resolution and multi frame superresolution is something I am deeply interested in. I am very sceptical about any deep learning efforts into synthesizing pixels or new censors. I work with low resolution photography myself and can understand the aproach my head can see texture and contexture in a 120x160 image because it has seen the very texture with it's own eyes. It also applies to other wavelength than just visible light. But it is limited to me. I am working on a zine right now to share my photography and I am really excited to get feedback as all images there were taken by me with the subject seen in full natural eye resolution. Other will have difficulties to bridge the gab. I have seen the TED talk about the EHT imaging algorithm in like 2017 and go swayed by her presentation. In 2-3 years when I studied CS+EE I might look at it differently. as intermediate mass blackholes are good theory, I would love to see one of these by the half of this century, if they aren't we will at least have better resolution by using either real telescope arrays in heliocentric orbit(to have baselines of earth orbit) and capture times of 2-3 years. I hope to get resutls in my favorite wavelenght the "N band" 8-14 micron.

Is there a video around that elaborates on how black holes can radiate away energy? The explanation that I heard is that the radiation is powered by the star that this object once was. whatever magnetic field there was it is slowly collapsing outside the event horizon and it is slow because of the time dilation.

I'm still struggling to understand why the inbound side of the accretion disk is brighter rather than blue-shifted.

The precession of Mercury's perihelion is NOT addressed by special relativity or the speed of Mercury. The speed of the orbit relative to the sun or us isn't even a tiny fraction of the speed of light. The precession is explained by general relativity. I love coming to this channel to hear the silliest of things, and thus remain adamantly subscribed.

At 3:23 was anyone else thinking of the Cat from Red Dwarf going "A big orange swirly thing in space"?