First Image of a Black Hole May Be Revealed. Follow the Announcement Here.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/lnJi0Jy692w
Astronomers at last may have captured images of the darkest entities in the cosmos.
At 9 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil the first-ever images of a black hole.
For some years now, scientific literature, news media and films have featured remarkably sophisticated and academic computer simulations of black holes. If all has gone well, the images today will reveal the real thing, and scientists at last will catch a glimpse of what had seemed unseeable.
How can I watch the big reveal?
A number of news conferences are being held around the world — the Event Horizon Telescope organizers shared links to events in an assortment of countries and languages. You can watch the news conference from the United States on the National Science Foundation’s website, or in the video player embedded below.
Remind me, what’s a black hole?
Black holes are objects so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape from their gravity. They were predicted by the equations of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as solved by the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild in 1915. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper.
To Einstein’s surprise, the equations indicated that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping matter and light in perpetuity. Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes waiting for something to fall in. Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that have burned up their fuel and collapsed. Others, millions or billions times more massive than the sun, lurk at the centers of galaxies.
Why do scientists want to take pictures of black holes?
Actual images would provide a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it.
Astrophysicists think that supermassive black holes are the engines that generate the prodigious energies of quasars and other explosive galactic nuclei. Doomed, superheated gas swirls around the hole, like water around a drain, and is forced out the sides as an enormous cosmic blowtorch. Today’s images could show how this process works.
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Where are these black holes?
One of the objects the astronomers studied, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas. It is equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe.
Another is in the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that has a jet of energy some 5,000 light years long shooting out of it.
What will a black hole look like?
It might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether it is rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing it are slightly wrong, or if it is spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe.
How have scientists been trying to take the picture?
The images emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. In all, eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the Sagittarius and Virgo black holes on and off for 10 days in April of 2017.
Donald Trump’s trade obsession keeps the peace with China
The US president is not interested in a clash of philosophies because of his fixation
A year has passed since Donald Trump ended an era of relative comity between the two greatest powers in the world. The US president’s trade tariffs against China provoked countermeasures and counter-countermeasures that flustered markets and even inspired some lurid prognostications of a new cold war.
Now, we learn, a truce is in the offing. The two sides are in promising discussions in Washington. An agreement is “closer and closer”, reports Larry Kudlow, the economic adviser to Mr Trump.
Well that, to misquote the internet meme, de-escalated quickly. It is easy to see why. A US-China accord would perk up the economic mood all over the world, and that, for a president 18 months from an election, is an irresistible prize. Mr Trump could offer voters statesmanlike lustre after teasing concessions from a foreign power, without the pain of lasting conflict.
Before the world toasts the avoidance of a second cold war, though, consider a bleak alternative: the real showdown will occur after Mr Trump’s presidency. What we now see as a shocking rupture in US-China relations might come to seem a relative Eden. And the man we now see as a spoiler of the peace could be a friend of it.
Mr Trump’s belligerent style distracts from the fact that he has very few grievances with the other side. Essentially, he has just the one: trade. He believes that Beijing has played a guileless America like a fiddle in their economic dealings since at least the 1990s. It is an intense, long-held and sometimes exaggerated complaint. But it is just one complaint. And, being a practical matter, to do with handbag tariffs and technology transfer, it is possible to negotiate it away.
Beyond the economics, his wariness towards China is not obviously more pronounced than that of a generic US president. Given his taste for strong governments, perhaps it is less so. Say what you will about Mr Trump’s bean-counting mercantilism — his belief that current-account deficits are always and everywhere for suckers — it is at least a contained obsession. He is not interested in a wider clash of philosophies with China because he has no wider philosophy.
What Mr Trump has instead is his life-long idée fixe: that any transaction has a winner and a loser, and America has lost for too long.
A list of subjects in which the president takes little or no interest, then, might include: Chinese internal affairs, the insecurity of US allies in Asia, the diplomatic favour of African countries as China invests all over their continent, the viability of international bodies in which a rising power has little stake, and the ideological tussle between democracy and one-party rule for mastery of the 21st century. These are the things that are likely to set the two powers against each other in the coming decades. Under this presidency, they are all secondary to trade.
In other words, it is Mr Trump’s very narrowness that is keeping a lid on great-power tension. His view of the world as a kind of polyglot bazaar, in which the central goal is to avoid being ripped off, is hardly stirring. But it serves the international order by limiting US-China enmities to the negotiable realm of economics. He does not expect a foreign power to change its essential character or ambitions.
It is at our own peril that we wish for a more expansive Trumpian foreign policy, informed by “values” and a broader construal of the national interest. We are likely to find out one way or the other. It is improbable that the US will have another president with such an economic monomania. Mr Trump has not just a chief executive’s limited vision of geopolitics, but a chief financial officer’s, or even an accountant’s.
Mr Trump the China dove: as recently as 2018, this idea would have read like so much try-hard contrarianism. By the end of 2019, it might be just a mildly subversive proposition. The speed with which he appears to be reaching a trade pact with Beijing suggests that this is all he ultimately cares about. That is unlikely to be true of his successors.
Until now, it has been soothing to regard Mr Trump as the storm before the calm. He would disrupt US-China relations and future leaders would mend them again. But the opposite could be true. By breaking the taboo against confrontation, Mr Trump has emboldened successors with far wider-ranging grievances than trade to vent them. If they do, skirmishes over washing-machine tariffs would count as the good old days. An uneasy thought, is it not, that one of the president’s lowest qualities, his materialism, could be a force for peace.
Gapping down
In reaction to disappointing earnings/guidance:
- MSM -4.8%, WDFC -3.4%, PSMT -1.3%
Other news:
- PTE -11.7% (announces public offering of common stock)
- SBGL -5.7% (places 108,932,356 new ordinary shares at a price of R15.50 per share)
- PHAS -4.5% (files for 3 mln share common stock offering)
- AMRS -4.2% after closing up 19% on the day; also says received Nasdaq notice for non-compliance as expected)
- APPS -1.6% (files for $100 mln mixed securities shelf offering)
Analyst comments:
- TERP -2.4% (downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Goldman)
Gapping up
In reaction to strong earnings/guidance:
- SLP +9.7%, LEVI +7.4%, DAL +2.3%, GTBIF +2.2%, TSM +0.5%
Other news:
- JBLU +3.3% (reports March traffic +7.6% yr/yr; may announce trans-Atlantic routes; the company is hosting an event today - CNBC)
- AMGN +1.8% (Amgen and UCB confirm FDA approval for EVENITY (romosozumab-aqqg) for the treatment of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women at high risk for fracture)
- EXC +0.9% (upgraded to Neutral from Sell at Goldman)
- SNAP +0.6% (users could drop 2.8% yr/yr to 77.5 mln in FY19, according to eMarketer Research)
- LAZ +0.5% (reports preliminary assets under management)
Analyst comments:
- GH +5% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BofA/Merrill)
- FSLR +4.2% (target raised to $75 from $64 at Goldman and adds the name to the Conviction Buy List)
- KBH +1.9% (upgraded to Neutral from Underweight at JP Morgan)
- PHM +1.5% (upgraded to Neutral from Underweight at JP Morgan)
- GILD +1.4% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at UBS)
- AMD +1.4% (target raised to $33 at Cowen)
- PAAS +0.9% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Deutsche Bank)
- DIS +0.7% (upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital Markets)
Early premarket gappersGapping up:
- SLP +9.7%, LEVI +6.7%, JBLU +3.7%, GTBIF +2.2%, AMGN +1.6%, EXC +0.9%, HPE +0.8%, LAZ +0.5%
Gapping down:
- PTE -12.3%, AMRS -7%, PHAS -6.9%, SBGL -6.6%, WDFC -3.2%, APPS -1.6%, PSMT -1.3%
eMarketer Slashes Snapchat Growth Forecast for 2019
Instagram will benefit, adding nearly 19 million users by 2023
Following its unpopular redesign, Snapchat has been struggling to gain users in the US. As a result, eMarketer has significantly downgraded its growth outlook for Snapchat in its latest US social usage forecast. For the first time, Snapchat will lose monthly US users this year, with growth expected to flatten in 2020.
In 2019, Snapchat will have 77.5 million monthly US users, down 2.8% from last year. This represents a significantly lower projection than eMarketer expected in its Q3 2018 forecast, which anticipated 6.6% growth to 90.4 million monthly US users this year.
“Many users didn’t like how Stories and chats were mixed together in a confusing redesign that went into effect in late 2017 and was broadly available by early 2018,” said eMarketer forecasting analyst Showmik Podder. “The backlash was so severe that Snapchat was forced to scale back some of the changes just a few months later.”
That wasn’t enough to forestall a dip this year. Snapchat user growth will plateau in 2020. Between 2019 and 2023, we forecast that Snapchat will only add 600,000 new US users.
In 2020, Snapchat’s growth rate (0.4%) will remain well below that of US social network usage as a whole (2.4%). As a result, Snapchat’s share of US social network users will continue to drop from its peak in 2017. It will capture 37.9% of social users this year, down from nearly 40% in 2018.
“Increased competition from new and existing social platforms is partly to blame for Snapchat’s decline,” said eMarketer senior analyst Jasmine Enberg. “But the product launches the company announced last week, including an in-app gaming platform, may improve user engagement and time spent, particularly among its core young user base. Gaming also provides a new revenue stream for Snapchat that could boost its ad business in the future.”
Instagram will pick up many of those leaving Snapchat. This year, it will have 106.7 million US users, up 6.2% from 2018. The Facebook-owned property will add nearly 19 million new US users by 2023.
Unlike Snapchat, Instagram’s growth rate is higher than that of social network users in general, pushing Instagram’s US share to 52.2% this year, up nearly 2 percentage points from 2018.