The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on Hawai’i’s Mauna Kea and Atacama’s Large Submillimeter Array (SMA) answered some cosmic prayers this week.
Event Horizon Discovery by Global AstroSci Team
Summit of Mauna Kea at 13,000ft has ideal microclimate for Harvard-Smithsonian Event Horizon 8-telescope array
The Submillimeter Array of eight radio telescopes alongside the James Clerk Maxwell Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai’i have sent earthling skywatchers skyrocketing with delight, as they released their first picture of Messier-87—a super-dense neutron region or ‘black hole’ in Virgo galaxy this week.
Hawai’i is crucial to Event Horizon (EHT)’s world network. Its high volcanic setting provides cloud-free receiving/bending of its own multiple signal—from three points in an array of eight new [radio]telescopes, top, with Mauna Kea Observatory’s James Clerk Maxwell 49-foot dish telescope, and reusing CalTech’s nearby CSO ‘redundant’ observatory.
Previously co-funded by Great Britain, Canada and Netherlands, EHT is presently co-sponsored by Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts with the Academia Sinica, and a consortium of astrophysics interests from Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea and Chile. EHT is in international partnership with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with NRC (Canada), NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea). Vital cooperation is the link with the Republic of Chile—where ALMA‘s 66 high-precision antennae are located on the Chajnantor plateau, at 5000 meters altitude/one mile high in northern Chile.
(ALMA)=Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
Event Horizon Telescope —EHT— world’s 1st super-array captures its first picture of ultra-dense neutron region M-57 in constellation Virgo
The Event Horizon Telescope—EHT—is a global array of radio telescopes involving dozens of institutions and astrophysicists round the world. Breakthrough discovery by the EHT is an image of Messier 87 (M-87)’s supermassive neutron black hole at the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light years away. This neutron-dense region contains 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.
Affectionately named ‘black holes’ are extremely compressed cosmic objects, containing extraordinary amounts of mass packed densely into a tiny region of space. This mass is shrouded by an event horizon—a boundary beyond which nothing—not even light—can escape its electromagnetic/gravitational pull.
They affect their surroundings in extreme ways, including warping spacetime and heating surrounding material to hundreds of billions of degrees. Albert Einstin in his 1915 Theory of General Relativity predicted that a black hole would cast a circular shadow on its bright, glowing material. The newly-released image of M87 from EHT reveals this shadow.
Light emitted from inside the event horizon can never reach the outside observer. Likewise, any object approaching the horizon from the observer’s side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon—its image becoming more and more redshifted as time elapses. This means that the wavelength of the light emitted from the object is getting longer as the object moves away from the observer. The traveling object, however, experiences no strange effects and does, in fact, pass through the horizon in a finite amount of ‘proper’ time.
As high as the Swiss Alps, Mauna Kea hosts climate-immune radiotelescope array for worldwide science cooperative
Black hole event horizons are widely misunderstood. Common, although erroneous, is the notion that black holes vacuum up material in their neighborhood, where in fact they are no more capable of seeking to consume than any other gravitational attractor. As with any mass in the universe, matter must come within its gravitational scope for the possibility to exist of capture or consolidation with any other mass. Equally common is the idea that matter can be observed falling into a black hole. This is not possible either.
Astronomers can detect only accretion disks around black holes, where material moves with such speed that friction creates detectable high-energy radiation. Matter from these accretion disks is forced out along the axis of spin of the black hole, creating visible jets where the streams interact with matter—such as interstellar gas—or if they happen to be aimed directly at Earth.
J.A.Peacock Cosmological Physics, 1999
A distant observer—or world-class telescope array—will never actually see something reach the horizon. Instead, while approaching its edge, the object will seem to go ever more slowly, while any light it emits will be further and further redshifted.
Earth-size Telescope Dish
In order to see a black hole for the first time, the Event Horizon Telescope team hooked up an array of radio telescopes in Hawai’i, Central and South America (Atacama), Europe, Greenland and Antarctica, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) dish in Cambridge, MA.
EHT signals from global telescope network create earth-size dish receiver, beamed Mauna Kea HI to Cambridge MA for image resolution by the EHT team
Using a technique known as very long baseline (vLBI) interferometry, the CfA-MIT team took precisely-timed data from each radio telescope, combining them to produce images comparable with what an Earth-hemisphere-sized dish would capture. The resulting virtual telescope has the highest resolution of any instrument ever built on earth, in orbit within the Solar System—or even beyond the Heliopause where Voyagers I & II entered Interstellar Space.
We’re a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers. That’s what it took to achieve something once thought impossible.
Katie Bouman, PhD CfA elec.engineer/computer sci
Co-author six papers in Astrophysical Journal Letters
EHT’s image reveals that this enormous black hole—large enough to engulf the solar system—anchors a jet that extends outwards for tens of thousands of light years.
Hawai’i’s Mauna a Wakea—white mountain—multiple telescope array at 13,803feet on the dormant volcano played crucial role in Event Horizon success
There are already plans to expand the EHT: to enable the team to make time-lapse movies of the dynamics of this (newly-discovered) living system, and to discover how the jet draws its energy from this negative source.
Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of thirteen pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.
All Very Baseline Interferometry
Event Horizon observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronizes 13 telescopes around the world, using earth’s rotation to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. This lets EHT achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arc-seconds—enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris.
From Chile’s Atacama high desert to Spain’s Sierra Nevada to Mauna Kea’s multiple array, telescopes worldwide combined to bring new images beyond human expectation and belief
Resolution of the EHT image depends on separation distance between the telescopes—the baseline—and the short-millimeter radio wavelengths captured around the world. EHT’s finest resolution is achieved by the longest baseline, which for M87 stretches from Hawai’i to Spain and Greenland to Antarctica. To optimize long baseline sensitivity—or make detection possible—the team developed a specialized system which combines all signals from Mauna Kea’s SMA dishes, letting Hawai’i act as a single EHT station.
Beaming-coordinating signals from night-time (western) half of the globe employs optimum use of precious telescope time when the other—Asian—hemisphere is in daylight.
After separately recording signals at all thirteen telescopes, data are flown to a single location and combined by computer to create an image by a virtual Earth-size telescope—first of its kind.
Petabytes, Raw Data and Red Shift
Lindy Blackburn, EHT data processing team leader and coauthor explains that EHT holds millions of gigabytes of data from many telescopes that weren’t originally designed to work together. ‘We developed multiple pathways to process and calibrate data, using new algorithms to stabilize the Earth’s atmosphere and to align the signals from all sites within trillionths of a second precisely.’
Rapidly spinning supermassive hole surrounded by its accretion disc of rotating leftovers from Sun-like star ripped apart by the hole’s tidal force, courtesy ALMA Large Array, Atacama
Telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA*, APEX, the Spanish IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Greenland Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope. Petabytes of raw data from all telescopes were combined by highly specialized supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Munich, and MIT Haystack Observatory, Cambridge, MA.
*Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimeter Array in Andes high desert, Chile
Global teamwork meant a close collaboration by astrophysicists, technicians and researchers around the world—and a first for science.
Construction of the EHT and this week’s observations represent the culmination of decades of close technical theoretical work. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of world agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), EU’s European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia, above.
On a planetary level, we sci-fi addicts thank the team for rising above national barriers and creating something previously only dreamed of.
October 6th crop circle at East Field, Alton Barnes highlights overwintering wildlife-friendly crop of brassica and barley,
photo Olivier Morel
We are trapped in a world of too much infor-mation. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the Rainbow Bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
We have to understand.
Terence McKenna (1946-2000)
American philosopher, author, ethnobotanist and visionary
With the onset of October, country communities in the Northern hemisphere are preparing for winter and ‘death’ of the Earth, farmers gathering up strawbales for feed, ploughing and planting overwintering crops. Meanwhile in the cities, activity usually turns to entertainment or to seasonal frivolity—thoughts inwards are not usually the province of mass media. But societal consciousness has changed and now, where it used to be the ‘news’ that people watched, it is the internet, with increasing mass communication of End Times, not entirely uninfluenced by this month’s Calleman version end-date of the Tzolkin Calendar of the Maya on October 28th. On that date, he says, humanity reaches the top of the Ninth Wave, the peak of the nine-step pyramid of Underworlds/Consciousness: the End of Time as we know it.
Autumn this year, however, has brought out the youth of humanity into the streets in droves. The young ones have decided enough is enough; time to speak up about world conditions: Occupy Wall Street *(OWS) has burgeoned into Occupy Chicago, and Los Angeles (second week); with Occupy Maine and Portland,OR., Dallas, Boston (from Oct.6), Dublin and Phoenix (Oct.8, Yom Kippur) Iowa and London (Oct.9, Day for Trees), and including a flurry of Occupy cities scheduled for October 15th, World Revolution Day, collectively marking World Food Day, Columbus Day and Canadian Thanksgiving. Cities—and countries—joining the Occupy movement this week include Montreal, Canada; Brussels, Belgium; Sweden, Holland, Finland and France.
It is no mean feat to camp out in foul weather, with storms predicted—which mid-October often brings—with donated food, little shelter, less money and no end in sight. Yet, this is what the movement is prepared to withstand, in order to get a message across to their audience—the ‘fat cats’—that the underdog has tolerated intolerance and inequality long enough and it’s time to make a stand on human rights.
Truth cannot be told, so as to be understood, and not be believ’d—William Blake
[If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed]
It is no coincidence that mainstream media has ignored the Occupy movement. It appears to be too sensitive an issue to report responsibly. It touches too many sacred cows that have been allowed to roam for so long and eat all the pasture; so that amazing technological extension of human consciousness—the internet—has picked up the slack.
The worldwide web has been alive with the OWS movement, with wild stories as well as heart-warming intimacies, spreading faster than mainstream negative news is capable of reporting. The internet has come into its own.
The internet has always had purpose: to bring together MINDS. FB and Twitter are just the fluff on the exterior blowing into the winds of change… there is a deeper connection we are beginning to see and need to appreciate and use. This extension-of-Mind was foreseen by many visionaries, but we, the Now generation—from teenage OWSers to aging Baby Boomers (now outnumbered by the teens)—are still here and can make it work for us.
Mind, consciousness, creative thought have always been Mankind’s blessing, his headstart on the lesser animals, but the Earth is straining under her human shackles. She, too, wants to be free.
The Earth, like her biological inhabitants, seems to be responding to that End-of-Time ‘attractor’, a point beyond the human now, a future dream coming closer—McKenna’s ‘Dwellpoint ahead in the temporal dimension’, his Eschaton.
Glittering entity attracting us into our future... ALMA's first deepspace image, Catseye nebula
This scintillating object glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, not only of the past of the Universe and the evolutionary progression into Novelty, but a map of the future.
Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that we are now in shock.
I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we’re surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what’s out there.
Western religions have persistently integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, Ascension, stepping into heaven-on-earth. It seems that is not going to happen according to any of the orthodox religious scenarios, however, but through basic human will and intuition.
The Universe her/himself—that great Being we dare not see as intelligent—seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence. And s/he will take us, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system and the Galaxy, along with her.
Ritually tuning into the earth...
This is what shaman- ism has always been about. A shaman is someone who has been to the end. He knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and causality. He has actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and embedded language, into the presence of what Wittgenstein called “the unspeakable”.
This presence will yield knowledge which can be brought back for the good of the community. For 90% of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution. He learns techniques to go between ordinary reality and the realm of ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel with us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the Mystery. Shamans have been able to de-condition themselves from Society’s instinctual distrust of the Mystery, in order to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge. They recover and bring back the jewel lost at the beginning of time: to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors.
T McKenna, 1997
Almost invariably, the shaman who finds himself in the transcendental presence of the Other is humbled. But with practice, he becomes wise; and in nearly every indigenous culture on planet Earth, this Universal wisdom is shared.
The Land of Gaia
‘Shamanism is not a religion; it is a set of techniques, and one of the principal techniques is the use of visionary plants. These natural psyche-enhancers dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one’s eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female.’ The Archaic Revival, 1991
McKenna found shamans acted as exemplars, by making a psychic journey to the domain of Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art, and meshing them with the human struggle to save the world. The planet has its own intelligence, and under certain circumstances it will actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being.
Kiesha Crowther's new book: Message for the Tribe of Many Colors imparts earth wisdom to see us through End times
McKenna’s reverence for the human body and the planet Earth is echoed—without herbal help—by Kiesha Crowther, ‘Little Grandmother’, also a shaman, chosen keeper of earth wisdom for the Tribe of Many Colors, and from childhood a lifelong outdoors-living person. Having spent countless days and nights in the high farming community of Colorado, she is able to tune into her heightened sense of (other) life around her, speaks to birds; she can intuit an elk on the highway up ahead. She has developed her own natural shamanist gifts, reinforced by a neglectful upbringing, and enhanced by spending a lot of time alone.
Her deep connection to nature brings her into ideal relationship with her surroundings: the Earth, her ‘Mother’. She has learned to communicate with owls, river water, puma, the Earth Mother herself, on an intuitive level—without words—but often in pictures.
She gets a tingly feeling, tastes straw in her mouth, smells violets or rain, and knows that she is sensing a being nearby. She trusts her own inner voice, she listens to messages from the trees, a blade of grass, a bee. She has been bailed out of some tricky situations by listening to this ‘voice’.
Now in her early thirties, she walks forward proclaiming that we should all stop right this minute and tune into what the Earth is—really—saying. Then we would have no hesitation in stopping oil drilling, copper mining, damming salmon rivers and seeding the atmosphere with manmade storms. The Earth has, after all, always supplied our needs, given us everything we have ever demanded. But she is getting restless, tired of giving, without replenishment or simple gratitude.
Mother Earth, too, is sentient. Kiesha agrees with McKenna that it is time to take better care of her, or she may not continue to be quite so tolerant.
Kiesha says:
‘Never take anything without being given permission. We are suffering the consequences now of being planet-robbers.’
Humanity going through sudden change, evolution speeding up at an unprecedented rate
Human beings are going through a pivotal shift that almost all life-forms go through, but there is something quite unique about us. We are evolving and changing at a supersonic pace that has never been seen before in the Cosmos. We human beings are going through an evolution of consciousness, making progressive leaps much faster than any life-form before. For this reason, we have caught the attention of other beings in our galaxy and in other galaxies. It seems that planet Earth is like a child in its spiritual evolution compared to other places, and yet we are growing and making giant leaps in consciousness, because of our special placement in the solar system. Great bursts of energy from our Sun are helping to speed us up and raise our consciousness at a pace never seen before. Kiesha Crowther, Message for the Tribe of Many Colors
She has learned that, however much negative people and outmoded opinions influence and put pressure on us, we can derive strength from this ultimate test to our spiritual will and reach through the hardest adversity to communion with our Higher Self, our Oversoul.
She believes that we can endure almost any hardship for just a little while longer until the love train starts to kick in. But it’s up to us to remember the goal, however hard our present circumstances. The movement is happening. People are beginning to live from the heart, rather than from the head. We are beginning to think as One. We are Ascending…
…But, things are falling apart. What do I do?
Kiesha now travels extensively, sharing her earth wisdom and assisting in placing specially-energized crystals in the earth at strategic points. This, she says, will help stabilize the earth grid which is also sensitive to negative manipulation by those who take what they please. She has often been asked what to do when things go crazy. Her suggestions for the End Times:
...plant a garden, know how to grow your own food, find a place to nurture your family...
Stay in the heart:
Secure loved ones & families;
Collect seeds and plant a garden;
Learn how to live sustainably, find out how to access clean water and make use of clean energy;
Instead of spending money on trinkets, buy things you need for your family; essentials which will support you and that will sustain your life through difficult times ahead.
‘Get a home, buy land if possible, grow food, store seeds, know how to grow a garden, find clean water—these are the things we should be doing to support our lives right now’
Kiesha Crowther
Turn off History
‘The twentyfirst century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.’
Coming from vastly different backgrounds, Kiesha from poverty, McKenna from the intellectual stratosphere, it is profound how much both visionaries share: in fact it’s fairly apocalyptic. Both are convinced that “History is ending”: that our generation is witnessing the revelation and purpose of the cosmos. McKenna said “History is the shock wave of the eschaton”. Crowther says “We are the strongest of the strong”, the “ones we have been waiting for”, and that we have chosen to be here to witness and help birth this time.
What this means for those of us living through this transition into hyperspace/love dimension, is that we are privileged to watch the greatest release of compressed change since the birth of the Universe. But we are also witnessing a coming together of vast groups with a common bond. It is vital we see the big picture and do not get caught up in the “old” news tactic of focusing on the negative.
The light of the Universe is made up of photons; there is no anti-particle. It's all light
The Big Picture is what is happening; differences are being laid aside. It is particularly apt that new initiatives are being led by the young. It is a long time since such freedom was witnessed and encouraged… the Boomer generation of the ‘sixties is now old and grey. But their ethos is still alive and well in the minds of the OWS youngsters. The message is not altogether alien. Flower power and ‘living in the heart’ have a similar ring.
The new physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means there is no dualism in the world of light.
The shockwave has huge reverberations, however.
OWS (and other) Occupy movements are taking hold; showing us a little of the wiring underneath the Motherboard. We are getting a glimpse of how the Universe works in demonstrating a coalescing of minds, bodies in the streets, consciousness in computerdom.
EarthDance founded in 1997, held Guinness book of Records 'greatest world drumming event 2004' in NoCAL; now a worldwide equinox event
“House music and rave culture and rhythms are rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound; and percussive sound can change neurological states. Large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are bonding in a telepathic community strong enough to carry the vision out into mainstream society. I think the youth culture that is emerging actually sums up Western civilization and points us in an entirely different direction.
We arrive in the third millennium, in the middle of an archaic revival—a revival of these physiologically-empowering rhythm signatures—a new art emerges, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego.”
Terence McKenna Alien Dreamtime
Paradoxically, computer networks display a deeply feminizing influence that society needs to change its mind. (Kiesha suggests we ‘change the channel’). In the hardware, the unconscious is actually being created; and, as we are learning pretty quickly, consciousness equals reality.
Both shamans would agree that the Unconscious, the deep feminine, is that part of us which we have neglected. It is time for its magic to reemerge.
The real secret of magic is a world made of words, and if you know the words the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish
Tonight the Moon is full in Aries – usually a great influence for action. If Calleman’s accelerated date is correct, the pinnacle of the pyramid, the beginning of the New is only two weeks away. He is not alone in his calculation. October 28th 2011 is 13 Ahau in the Tzolkin, named ‘Return of the Ancestors’ in Mayan prophecy: a signal, perhaps, that we should all step up to the plate and serve if we are to become friends with the Earth again. Because she feels mistreated, she may have a few more storms to blow before she believes us.
Wildlife-friendly East Field median strip was featured in 3 crop circles this summer; all sited along the line leading the eye to Bronze Age Knap Hill amphitheatre (N)
The Human race is already transforming. Are we prepared for consciousness evolution at a speed never before contemplated? We have to take our future in our own hands: help the needy, share the food, plant trees, and accept our responsibility for being here at this special time on this unique planet.
A simple crop circle sequence appeared in October (top and left) in East Field—out of season—the third occurrence this year along the same line-of-sight. Just like the Java crop circles in January and the Mexican crop circles at spring equinox, they highlighted the farming community’s care for wildlife, reverting to cultivation by traditional natural methods of nurturing the earth—no huge machinery—just a strip of carefully-planted food.
Famous East Field formation, double-bladed axe, vesica piscis dimensional formation of July 2010. Surrounding archaic script has yet to be interpreted
East Field is in croppie language a byword for the **hub**. The first of the nouvelle vague circles appeared here in the 1990s. Here is where light orbs are sighted most frequently, electrical equipment fails, ultrasound shrieks, the water table suddenly goes dry, and people experience spontaneous healing.
East Field, like Etchilhampton, is run by the good guys: farmers who add a little extra for wildlife. In Kiesha’s terminology, the Earth Mother is speaking in dulcet tones, approving where we show care for her; in McKenna-ese, the Other is stepping through the time fabric and leaving us his/her calling card. Either way, crop circles of 2011 have highlighted farms where earth nurture has taken precedence over earth rape. Perhaps we are beginning to please the Mother, after all.
We have to make a start somewhere. The youth in Wall Street, London, other cities of the world, have shown their card. We countrydwellers have to show our hand, too. We can plant our gardens, show respect and gratitude for our food, decline to shop for unnurtured sources of supply. Take care of the soil and the water. Go off the grid. If the OWS youth can show us the way, lend us their strong bodies, we oldies can stand on their shoulders and reach for the sky.
View from the Stars: whichever way you look at it, we are present in Sidereal time, Space is our growth medium, and stardust and water our constituent particles. When electromagnetically charged, our solar-powered circuitry is capable of Creating Anything We Choose.
Siderealview's Blog 
Recent Comments