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Our Top Ten Stories of The Year
This is not a list of the “best” stories of 2022, which would be taking sides. All our writers are excellent, all our stories are spectacular! This is instead a list of the most-read stories. And it’s not technically all 2022, it covers the last year. So the period includes December 2021. But it’ll give you a chance to catch up and to see what tickled our readers’ fancy during this weird year.
10. The Triumphant return of NightMara! (August). The media often overlooks VR’s potential to create immersive entertainment that may one day compete with your home screen and movie theaters. Audere‘s favorite VR show is Nightmara, so the arrival of a new episode in August was cause for some rejoicing, and an interview with the show’s writer/director, Gianpaolo Gonzalez.
9. Alan N. Levy’s Prescient Iran/Russia Warning (February). The late, great thriller writer, Alan N. Levy, once envisioned a future world that looks much like 2022, especially the behavior of Vladimir Putin in Eastern Europe. Earlier this year, Alan’s editor reflected on the remarkable predictions embedded in Alan’s great novel, The Tenth Plague.
8. OpenAI: A Less Toxic Chatbot? (January). Because chatbots are just language prediction models, they don’t have a conscience. Some scientists are working on that.
7. Is the Future Artificial? (July). We looked at all the ways that life is getting less “real,” from VR and AR to women who marry robots, and what to expect next. It’ll only get weirder
6. Defending Sam Wainwright, of “It’s a Wonderful Life” (December). Is Sam Wainwright the real hero of It’s a Wonderful Life? Is Mary Bailey the real villain?
5. An NFT Painting Transformed by Its Owner’s DNA: The Evans Brothers Explain (January). This is exactly what it sounds like. When you buy this NFT painting, your DNA will individualize it. Read on.
4. What to do on New Year’s Eve (Virtual Reality Edition) (December). In late 2021, with the pandemic still creeping along, some New Year’s revelers chose to party in virtual reality, the safest way to avoid catching a deadly disease. Here are some of the things they did.
3. The White Goddess: A New Micro-Budget Thriller with an Engrossing Mythological Twist (March). A secluded cabin in the dead of winter, an accident in the snow, a man and a woman stranded. All on a shoestring budget. We love it!
2. Six Years after Bulletproof Stockings, Perl Wolfe is Still Singing (June). Ah, the joys of an iconic Chassidic girl band! How does one top a thing like that?
1. Smoking Girl (April). In this short story by Steven S. Drachman, the most read of the year, two nighttime co-workers forge a superficial, temporary friendship over a 3 am cigarette break.
Russian troops’ poor performance and low morale may worsen during a winter of more discontent
Liam Collins, United States Military Academy West Point
With Russian troops digging trenches to prepare for an expected winter standoff, it would be easy to conclude that fighting will slow in Ukraine until after the ground thaws in the spring.
But evidence from the Ukrainian battlefields point to a different trajectory.
As a career U.S. special forces officer who conducted field research on the 2008 and 2014 wars in Georgia and Ukraine, it is my view that this war has demonstrated that only one side, the Ukrainians, can execute effective combat maneuvers. I believe that the Ukrainians will attempt to launch a large-scale counteroffensive in late winter when the ground is still frozen.
Winter’s impact on war
Historically, the pace of fighting does slow in the winter.
Weapons and other equipment can freeze up in extreme cold, and it’s much more difficult to shoot a weapon while wearing thick gloves.
Shorter days are a factor. Despite technological advances, most of the fighting during this war has occurred during the day.
But this winter may be different for the Ukrainian military.
First, Ukrainian winters are not nearly as cold and snowy as many believe.
Donetsk, for example, has an average temperature of nearly 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius) in January and February.
Its snowiest month, January, averages only 4.9 inches of snow, or .12 meters. Both January and February average just as many rainy days as snowy days – roughly two days of each.
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A brief history of Russian attack
Since the invasion began in February 2022, Russia made most of its gains in the first month of the war when it seized Kherson, surrounded Mariupol, and was on the doorsteps of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
But Russia soon gave up on Kyiv and withdrew all its forces from the north.
Failing to achieve quick victory, Russia instead settled on making incremental gains in the east and south. Over the next five months, Russia captured Mariupol, but little else of tactical or strategic value.
During this time, Ukraine built up its combat power with new weaponry from the West and planned a large counteroffensive, which it initiated on Aug. 28, 2022.
In the first week of the counteroffensive, Ukraine liberated more territory than Russia had captured in the previous five months.
The success of the counteroffensive showed that Ukraine’s military was superior to Russia’s in every category with the exception of size. It had better doctrine, leaders, strategy, culture and will – and it had just proved that it could effectively fight battles with a combination of artillery, tanks, soldiers and air attacks.
By Sept. 12, 2022, Ukraine had liberated much of Kharkiv Oblast as Russian troops routinely fled from their positions.
After liberating the entirety of Kharkiv Oblast in early October 2022, Ukraine turned its attention to Kherson in the south. This was a different fight, and in some ways Ukraine’s military followed Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s axiom of “winning without fighting.”
The Ukrainians were able to conquer much of the territory without using many troops on the ground.
Instead, Ukraine used long-range rockets supplied by the U.S. and NATO allies to bombard Russian bases and supply lines that were previously unreachable. These attacks left Russian forces west of the Dnipro River in an untenable position.
Realizing this, Russia shockingly announced on Nov. 9, 2022, that it was withdrawing from Kherson. Two days later, Russia had completed its withdrawal from the west bank of the river.
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What to expect from Russia
Over the course of the war, Russia has demonstrated little ability to conduct effective combat operations. This is not something that Russia can change overnight or over the course of the winter.
Russia’s best forces have been decimated throughout the conflict, and it is now increasingly relying on untrained conscripts.
Likewise, Russia is exhausting much of its weaponry as international sanctions against them are limiting Russia’s wartime production. Aside from Iran, few nations are providing military aid to Russia.
Russia’s military is now less trained, has lower morale, and has significantly fewer weapons and less ammunition than it had at the beginning of the current war.
As a result, Russia lacks the ability to conduct large-scale attacks, and it is left with little option but to continue what it has been doing: conducting missile strikes against targets that are either defenseless or offer little strategic value.
Limiting Russia’s options further, these strikes have been less effective as the war has progressed.
Early in the war, most of Russia’s missiles made it through Ukraine’s limited air defenses. With the help of western air defense systems, Ukraine was shooting down 50% of Russian missiles in October and is now intercepting over 80% of them.
Winter should not affect these types of combat operations.
But snow will have an impact on Russia’s already stressed and underperforming logistical system, and the cold will further lower – if that is possible – the already low morale of Russia’s poorly outfitted and undertrained soldiers.
What to expect from Ukraine
As the smaller military, Ukraine cannot afford to take heavy losses.
Thus far, it has used a strategy of defending territory when it could, retreating when it should to preserve combat power, and attacking when the opportunities have presented themselves.
Ukraine effectively employed this strategy to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war and during the September 2022 counteroffensive to reclaim the Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts.
An important question must be asked. Why did it take six months for Ukraine to launch its counteroffensive?
One reason is that Ukraine had to wait several months for promised Western aid to arrive at its bases. In my view, a significant factor is the lengthy amount of time it takes to plan large counteroffensives and to position supplies, equipment and forces.
The fact that Ukraine conducted the counterattacks in succession suggests that Ukraine lacks the combat power to conduct two large-scale counterattacks at the same time.
Ukraine is going to need time to regroup, refit and plan for its next large-scale operation.
Thus, it seems reasonable that Ukraine will have to wait at least 30 to 45 days – maybe more – before it is ready to execute its next counteroffensive, which would be in the heart of winter.
While conducting an attack in winter may be difficult, off-road movement in the spring could become impossible, as the Russians discovered during their initial invasion in muddy and wet terrain.
It seems reasonable to conclude that Ukraine may wish to initiate its next counteroffensive while the ground is still frozen – and Russian troop morale is at its lowest point since the invasion.
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Liam Collins, Founding Director, Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
It’s a Moth Pit! Food Safety Inspectors Found Moths in Coffee Storage Area at Manhattan Starbucks Reserve Roastery
Claudia Irizarry Aponte, The City
This article was originally published on Nov 16 2:27pm EST by THE CITY
Food safety inspectors with the state Department of Agriculture and Markets found live meal moths, dead meal moths and dead meal moth larvae in the coffee bean storage area at the Chelsea Starbucks Reserve Roastery last week — including on the coffee bean packaging.
Inspectors found the moths the same day they found “mold like residues” in the kitchen’s ice machine — a central complaint of workers who have been on strike at the location for the last three weeks.
The findings were included in the inspection report the agency issued to Starbucks on Nov. 9, which THE CITY obtained on Wednesday. The details in the report, and the meal moth sightings, had not been previously reported.
In addition to the meal moths, inspectors identified other “general deficiencies” including “moderate build-up of old food residues on food contact surfaces” like the matcha stirrer and the cappuccino nozzle and exposed roasted coffee beans in the retail area. The report described the conditions as “insanitary deficiencies that must be corrected without delay.”
“The presence of these conditions may result in the assessment of civil penalties,” the report read.
Andrew Tull, a spokesperson for the company, said in a statement to THE CITY that “the health and well-being of our partners and customers are our highest priorities.”
“We are actively working to address all findings. We look forward to the NYS Department of Agriculture’s reinspection and expect the Roastery to be in full compliance with all health and safety regulations,” he added. “We will continue to follow our rigorous cleaning and sanitization protocols to ensure the health and safety of our partners and customers.”
Starbucks Workers United of NY/NJ, the union representing Reserve Roastery workers, learned of the extent of the agency’s findings when THE CITY showed them a copy of the inspection report on Wednesday.
“The official report from the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets inspection at Starbucks’ NYC Roastery just last week, validated workers’ claims of mold in the ice machine and on food contact surfaces, stating that it was a ‘critical violation,’ as well as serious pest issues, including finding meal moths and larvae in the coffee bean storage area,” Leanne Tory-Murphy, a spokesperson for union, wrote in a statement.
“Workers should not need to go on strike for nearly a month over issues that should have already been dealt with by management to remain in compliance with basic health codes,” she added.
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What the Frap
The 103 workers at the Meatpacking District flagship store, which boasts a bakery, cocktail bar and $17 cold brews, have been on strike since Oct. 25 following staff sightings of bed bugs in the breakroom and mold in the ice machines.
State regulators who inspected the Roastery on Nov. 9, following an initial inspection on Nov. 4, probed the store for four and a half hours, according to the inspection report. They did not find bed bugs.
Inspectors instead found three meal moths flying in the green coffee bean storage area. They also found “one dead meal moth and three dead meal moth larvae … on the exterior packaging of green coffee beans in the storage area.”
They also found that a kitchen copper cooling pipe “is observed to contaminate ice for food service through dripping condensation.”
In both cases, the ice was “discarded and melted,” and inspectors instructed the coffee shop to “properly clean and sanitize the equipment.”
Both the mold and dripping pipe were categorized as “critical deficiencies” – conditions that “may result in the assessment of civil penalties and other action provided by law including administrative hearing or court action.”
Two days after that inspection, on Nov. 11, the company’s labor relations director Andria Kelly wrote in a letter to the union: “There is no pest infestation or moldy ice at the Roastery — when the strike started or now — and we don’t understand why the union continues to assert falsely otherwise.”
Tory-Murphy, the union spokesperson, pointed to that letter in a statement, noting that the state inspection report “directly contradicts statements from the Company, made as recently as November 11th, despite their knowledge of the inspection and the resulting destruction of the ice, which asserted that there were not – and had not been – mold or pest issues at the Roastery.”
The striking workers have said that they will return to work once management provides proof, such as an exterminator report, that the store is free of mold and other pests. They say the company so far has not provided them with one.
Starbucks said in a statement shared on their website on Oct. 27 the company had hired their own vendor to inspect the ice machine for mold and “found no noted operational or cleanliness concerns.” The company added it “made the decision to proactively upgrade and replace the machine with new equipment to improve the partner experience.”
That was two weeks before state inspectors found “mold like residues” and issued the Nov. 9 failing inspection.
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THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.
Canada: “Cancel Disney +” and the Liberal government’s wrong approach to “greedflation”
by Gloria Novovic. Originally published on Policy Options
November 17, 2022
“Cancel Disney+!” – the message from Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to Canadians struggling amid the affordability crisis – raises concerns about the government’s approach to what Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of labour, calls the inflation-by-corporate-greed crisis.
Although she later backtracked, the minister’s unsolicited personal finance advice reflects her broader solution to the current economic crisis – saving $9 billion in government spending by optimizing the budgets of federal programs.
Home economics tricks, however, are unlikely to solve the crisis of soaring housing, food and energy prices. More ambitious market interventions such as a wealth tax, market diversification and strengthened labour rights are urgently needed instead.
Homemade solutions for an economic crisis
In her interview with Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson, which aired in early November, Freeland acknowledged the financial hardship of “Canadian families [that] are looking very closely at all of their expenses.” Taking off her finance minister hat, she spoke instead “as a wife and a mother” and offered personal finance advice of minimizing non-essential costs. In her household, that meant cancelling the $13.99 monthly subscription to Disney+.
The Disney+ example reflects the Thatcherist “home economics” approach, which leads to policies that Neil Gilbert calls the “silent surrender of public responsibility.”
This tactic is dangerously effective: most people understand personal finance but have limited grasp of how state finance can and should be run. As a result, public attention is focused away from possible (and more effective) policy solutions and narrowed to seemingly reasonable (but insufficient) household fixes.
As populism rises, look at what has fallen: Wages
We need to better understand how racialized minorities are being hit by inflation
In this case, the minister’s fix of a $9-billion cut in federal spending will not end a crisis that defies the textbook rules of inflation. In normal inflation scenarios, rising employment pushes salaries up, which increases demand for goods and consequently prices go up. Now, however, employment is rising but the increase in prices has been going up unsustainably, with food prices, for example, rising faster than the overall inflation rate. Wages have not followed suit, plunging people across the country in the affordability crisis.
Freeland’s remarks offer a misleading message to Canadians. The government is not limited to belt-tightening: it has the responsibility to tackle the root causes of today’s higher prices – corporate greed. The real solution lies in an increase in the social safety nets, a wealth tax and long-term market changes.
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The difference between inflation and “greedflation”
The current debate on Canada’s budget considers only a limited repertoire of possible solutions. The Conservative Opposition is also off the mark when Pierre Poilievre blames government spending for inflation. The current inflationary environment is not a result of ballooning social welfare payments or rising wages (which would increase people’s purchasing power). Quite the contrary, we are facing an affordability crisis because the wages, especially for women, have not been catching up with the rest of the market.
Our crisis is not a market anomaly, it is the logical product of its current design. An Oxfam Canada report says that while Canadian government spent $109 billion on financial aid to workers between 2020 and 2022, the 59 Canadian billionaires saw their wealth increase by $111 billion.
The ultra-rich are, therefore, getting richer at the public expense: As the businesses they own raise prices while keeping wages low, the government is forced to spend taxpayers’ dollars to support the population facing the effects of “greedflation.”
As David Macdonald from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives argues, the corporate sector has managed to capture unprecedented gains from the current recovery, with profits increasing to 15.2 per cent of gross domestic product in 2022. However, companies’ profit has not resulted in higher wages; workers’ share of GDP fell by 0.8 percentage points between 2020 and 2022.
A wealth tax along with diversifying key industries therefore emerge as urgent issues to be addressed. As Phoebe Stephens points out, Canada’s food market, much like the global one, is in the hands of the few corporations, resulting in problems such as a 70-per-cent hike in the average grocery bill between 2000 and 2020. Despite global supply-chain issues, companies are making huge profits, with Loblaws admitting to a “favourable momentum shift” that led to a 40 per cent first-quarter profit increase compared to the same period last year.
A case for feminist domestic policy
In the current context, even the more ardent TV enthusiasts will be hard-pressed to solve their financial woes by cancelling their streaming subscriptions. Canadians can do little individually to diversify markets or implement a wealth tax, an idea the vast majority of Canadians supports. That work must be done by Freeland and the government itself, with its self-declared feminist orientations.
Corporate greed and wage stagnation particularly impact women and other marginalized people, who have been traditionally ignored in household-based economic policies. Similarly, given the economic importance, not to mention the economic rights, of Canada’s immigrant population, one would hope for more inclusive language that transcends the traditional category of “Canadian families” alone.
Even if Freeland’s household savings tips represent only a portion of her strategic arsenal against the current financial crisis, they feed a discourse that places the responsibility of solving systemic problems on individuals, not government. Our understanding of the cause of a problem determines what we consider to be a fair solution.
The current affordability crisis is a signal of a broader market imbalance in which the ultra-rich hold too much power. Instead of personal finance advice, the federal government should implement tax and market reforms on national and global levels (such as through the reform of the World Trade Organization).
It is reasonable to hold our elected leaders responsible for nurturing collective cohesion in the face of ongoing environmental, public health and economic crises. Increased social safety nets and welfare transfers must accompany a wealth tax – for which even some millionaires are calling! – and long-term market intervention that protects us from future greedflation scenarios.
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This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Iranians Continue Protests, Defying Rising Death Toll and Potential Execution
November 13, 2022
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams. Read the original here.
Demonstrations against Iran’s authoritarian regime continued for the 58th straight day Sunday despite the rising number of people killed by state forces and the Iranian parliament’s recent vote to execute protesters.
“The Iranian parliament is so disconnected from its people that it would rather kill them instead of hearing their legitimate concerns.”
Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist and communications director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, reports hundreds of people gathered Sunday in small groups outside Dey Hospital in Tehran, where dissident blogger Hossein Ronaghi was transported after his health dangerously deteriorated during a 50-day hunger strike at the capital’s notorious Evin Prison.
Ronaghi’s relatives told London-based Iran International that Hossein’s jailers tortured him—including by breaking both of his legs—and have withheld proper medical care since his arrest, despite serious medical conditions including partial kidney failure.
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Video posted on social media by Memarian also showed motorists honking their horns and shouting Ronaghi’s name. Other acts of defiance captured on video include a schoolgirl without the mandatory hijab headscarf knocking the turban from the head of a Shi’a cleric, a young woman defiantly waving her hijab on a freeway overpass, numerous demonstrations at universities and other schools, and several Iranian sports teams protesting during the playing of their national anthem.
On Saturday, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights NGO (IHRNGO) said security forces have killed at least 326 people, including 25 women and 43 children, during the nationwide protests sparked by the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested by Iran’s morality police three days earlier and reportedly beaten for violating the fundamentalist theocracy’s strict dress code.
IHRNGO said that “protesters have been killed in 22 provinces, with the most reported in Sistan and Baluchistan, Tehran, Mazandaran, Kurdistan, and Gilan, respectively.”
More than 15,000 protesters have also reportedly been arrested since the start of the demonstrations.
Iranians have kept up their protests despite the deadly dangers—which now include the risk of execution following a vote by 227 of Iran’s 290 members of parliament in favor of imposing the death penalty on demonstrators in order to teach them a “hard lesson.”
Among those sentenced to death in recent days for waging “war against God” is 27-year-old Kurdish rapper Saman Yasin.
“The Iranian parliament is so disconnected from its people that it would rather kill them instead of hearing their legitimate concerns,” Vahid Razavi, an Iran-born American technology activist, told Common Dreams Sunday.
Human rights defenders sounded the alarm Friday that Zoreh Elahian, one of the lawmakers who voted to execute protesters, was visiting New York City for a meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Iran currently sits on the 45-member commission, despite severely restricting women’s rights.
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“With the continuous repression of protests, many more indictments on charges carrying the death penalty and death sentences might soon be issued, and we fear that women and girls, who have been at the forefront of protests, and especially women human rights defenders, who have been arrested and jailed
for demanding the end of systemic and systematic discriminatory laws, policies and practices might be particularly targeted,” a group of U.N. experts said Friday.
“We urge Iranian authorities to stop using the death penalty as a tool to squash protests and reiterate our call to immediately release all protesters who have been arbitrarily deprived of their liberty for the sole reason of exercising their legitimate rights to freedom of opinion and expression, association, and peaceful assembly,” the experts added, “and for their actions to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms through peaceful means.”
Story Behind a Picture: What the image of the Milky Way’s black hole really shows
11.8.2022
Black holes keep their secrets close. They imprison forever anything that enters. Light itself can’t escape a black hole’s hungry pull.
It would seem, then, that a black hole should be invisible — and taking its picture impossible. So great fanfare accompanied the release in 2019 of the first image of a black hole. Then, in spring 2022, astronomers unveiled another black hole photo — this time of the one at the center of our own Milky Way.
The image shows an orange, donut-shaped blob that looks remarkably similar to the earlier picture of the black hole in the center of galaxy Messier 87. But the Milky Way’s black hole, Sagittarius A*, is actually much smaller than the first and was more difficult to see, since it required peering through the hazy disk of our galaxy. So even though the observations of our own black hole were conducted at the same time as M87’s, it took three additional years to create the picture. Doing so required an international collaboration of hundreds of astronomers, engineers and computer scientists, and the development of sophisticated computer algorithms to piece together the image from the raw data.
These “photos” do not, of course, directly show a black hole, defined as the region of space inside a point-of-no-return barrier known as an event horizon. They actually record portions of the flat pancake of hot plasma swirling around the black hole at high speeds in what’s known as the accretion disk. The plasma is composed of high-energy charged particles. As plasma spirals around the black hole, its accelerating particles emit radio waves. The blurry orange ring seen in the images are an elaborate reconstruction of these radio waves captured by eight telescopes scattered around the Earth, collectively known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
The latest image tells the tale of the epic journey of radio waves from the center of the Milky Way, providing unprecedented detail about Sagittarius A*. The image also constitutes “one of the most important visual proofs of general relativity,” our current best theory of gravity, says Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam and member of the EHT collaboration.
Studying supermassive black holes such as Sagittarius A* will help scientists learn more about how galaxies evolve over time and how they congregate in vast clusters across the universe.
From the galactic core
Sagittarius A* is 1,600 times smaller than Messier 87’s black hole that was imaged in 2019, and is also about 2,100 times closer to Earth. That means the two black holes appear to be about the same size on the sky. Geoffrey Bower, an EHT project scientist at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, says that the resolution required to see Sagittarius A* from Earth is the same as would be required to take a picture of an orange on the surface of the Moon.
The center of our galaxy is 26,000 light-years away from us, so the radio waves collected to create this image were emitted around the time that one of the earliest-known permanent human settlements was constructed. The radio waves’ voyage began when they were first emitted from particles in the black hole’s accretion disk. With a wavelength of about 1 mm, the radiation traveled toward Earth relatively undisturbed by the intervening galactic gas and dust. If the wavelength were much shorter, like visible light, the radio waves would have been scattered by the dust. If the wavelength were much longer, the waves would have been bent by charged clouds of plasma, distorting the image.
Finally, after the 26,000-year trek, the radio waves were picked up and recorded at the radio observatories distributed across our planet. The large geographic separation between the observatories was essential — it allowed the consortium of researchers to detect extremely subtle differences in the radio waves collected at each site through a process called interferometry. These small differences are used to deduce the minuscule differences in the distance each radio wave traveled from its source. Using computer algorithms, the scientists managed to decode the path-length differences of the radio waves to reconstruct the shape of the object that emitted them.
Researchers put all this into a false-color image, where orange represents high-intensity radio waves and black represents low-intensity. “But each telescope only picks up a tiny fraction of the radio signal,” explains Fulvio Melia, an astrophysicist at University of Arizona who has written about our galaxy’s supermassive black hole. Because we’re missing much of the signal, “instead of seeing a crystal clear photo, you see something that’s a little foggy … a little blurred.”
The image helps reveal more about the black hole’s event horizon — the closest point to which anything can approach the black hole without being sucked in. Beyond the event horizon, not even light can escape.
From the image, scientists have been able to better estimate the size of the event horizon and deduce that the accretion disk is tilted by more than 40 degrees from the Milky Way’s disk, so that we’re seeing the round face of the flat accretion disk, rather than the thin sliver of its edge.
But even if the black hole’s accretion disk were oriented edge-on relative to Earth, the gravity around the black hole warps the space around it so much that light emitted from the backside of the black hole would be bent around to come toward us, making a ringlike image regardless of its orientation. So, how do scientists know its orientation? Because the ring is mostly round; if we were viewing the accretion disk edge-on, then the ring would be more squished and oblong.
Markoff thinks that this new ability to look into the heart of our galaxy will help to fill in gaps in our understanding of the evolution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe. A dense, massive object such as a black hole at the center of a galaxy influences the movements of the stars and dust near it, and that influences how the galaxy changes over time. Properties of the black hole, such as in which direction it spins, depend on the history of its collisions — with stars or other black holes, perhaps. “A lot of people … look at the sky and think of it all as static, right? But it’s not. It’s a big ecosystem of stuff that’s evolving,” Markoff says.
So far, the fact that the image matches the scientists’ expectations so precisely makes it an important confirmation of current theories of physics. “This has been a prediction that we’ve had for two decades,” Bower says, “that we would see a ring of this scale. But, you know, seeing is believing.”
10.1146/knowable-110822-1
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.
Illustration by Audere Magazine, interpreting an original image from Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration | Maunakea Observatories.