5 ms·

but why was the picture taken of black hole have accretion disk yellow?

• 20k 2mo ago
  They used a greyscale -> colour mapping, it wasn't really red/yellow. It was just for vibes. Its one of my minor pet peeves about the EHT visualisations, but given that its visualisations for effect its relatively fine. I'd have preferred blue given that its such a common misconception, but if you're a paper author trying to get your work publicly recognised then rule of cool is a good enough excuse
• aplavin 2mo ago
  The vast majority of scientific images, be it in papers on press releases, are using an arbitrarily-chosen colormap to map whatever numeric values are there to actual visible pixels. For the Event Horizon Telescope speficially – it is a radio telescope, so what it sees has no intrinsic "color" as perceived by a human eye at all. Same with this simulation here.