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A Sand Dollar’s Breakfast is Totally Metal | Deep Look Video
Their skeletons are prized by beachcombers, but sand dollars look way different in their lives beneath the waves. Covered in thousands of purple spines, they have a bizarre diet that helps them exploit the turbulent waters of the sandy sea floor.
This is another installment of the PBS Deep Look series; this installment is adapted from the “It’s OK to be Smart” series. If no film or link appears in this email, go to the blog to view it by clicking on the blog title above. If the film stops & starts in an annoying manner, press pause (lower left double bars ||) to let it buffer and get ahead of you. [Chuck Almdale]
Black Hole Photo Released
Not a fuzzy hot doughnut, but a glowing accretion disc around a black hole.
The photo released today was of the enormous black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87, 55 million light years from earth and 7 billion times more massive than our sun, which we mentioned in our blog yesterday.
The Guardian has a nice write-up on the black hole, photo and release of the photo here. It contains some worthwhile explanatory graphics (although the YouTube film we mentioned yesterday is more detailed and complete). It also mentions the young woman who made this possible – Computing and Mathematical Scientist Dr. Katie Bouman, now at CalTech, but still a Masters Degree student at MIT when she came up with the key algorithm that could crunch all the data from all the radio telescopes involved in order to produce this single picture.
And it was a lot of data. So much data that the half-ton of hard drives needed to hold it had to be physically shipped to MIT. An extra six months had to pass for the data from the south pole to arrive, as there are no flights in or out during the Antarctic winter.
This CNN.com article has more on Bouman, hero of science, and this phys.org article has more on her algorithm. [Chuck Almdale]
Katie Bouman
Black Hole Photo Tomorrow 10 April, 2019
At 6 AM Pacific time, astronomers operating the Event Horizon Telescope network of radio telescopes plan to release their photos of two black holes. One hole sits at the center of our galaxy with a mass 4.1 million times that of our sun. The other is at the center of galaxy Messier 87 in the Virgo constellation Virgo, and is 7 billion times more massive than our sun and spews jets of particles.
I know you’re all awaiting this photographic event with baited breath, and just in case you’re not completely up-to-date on the peculiarities of black holes and photographing them, here’s a great explanation by astrophysicist Derek Mueller. [Chuck Almdale]
Watch as two male Greater Birds-of-Paradise display together in the rainforest canopy. Several females arrive to check out the males, spurring them to begin a dual display. One female chooses a male, allowing him to approach and begin the next phase of display. The closeness and physical contact give her the chance to make a final decision about his suitability. Filmed and photographed by Tim Laman.
There are currently seventy-two short films in the entire Birds-of-Paradise Project playlist, ranging from 26 seconds to 8:29. In the upcoming weeks, we will present some of our favorites.
A film from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If no film or link appears in this email, go to the blog to view it by clicking on the blog title above. If the film stops & starts in an annoying manner, press pause (lower left double bars ||) to let it buffer and get ahead of you. The lab is a member-supported organization and they welcome your membership and support. [Chuck Almdale]
SANTA MONICA BAY AUDUBON SOCIETY BLOG 