Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 9–12, 2022; New York
Session G03: History of Astrophysical VisualizationsInvited Live Streamed Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FHPP Chair: Paul Halpern, University of the Sciences Room: Salon 1 |
Sunday, April 10, 2022 8:30AM - 9:06AM |
G03.00001: Merging the Sun and the Stars: the hybrid images of the 1919 eclipse Invited Speaker: Matthew Stanley The pioneering observation of the gravitational deflection of light at the solar eclipse of 1919 required the development of new visual tools and techniques. The evidence for Einstein’s theory was, in the end, a series of photographs that were presented as records of a genuinely novel phenomenon. It was challenging to connect these material records to the abstract concepts of general relativity, though, and their validity was only established by connecting back to already-established methods. Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington, the leaders of the observational project, persuaded the scientific community of the validity of the observations by fusing two distinct traditions in astronomical photography – eclipse images and astrometry - to create a new visual approach specific to general relativity. |
Sunday, April 10, 2022 9:06AM - 9:42AM |
G03.00002: History of Black Hole Visualizations Invited Speaker: Emilie Skulberg Existing work on Penrose diagrams has shown how they were used to promote intuition of objects such as black holes by representing General Relativity in the form of ‘paper tools’ (Wright 2012, 2013). Drawing on an extensive collection of visually realistic black hole images (a collection made as part of this project), as well as interviews with black hole researchers, I take the question of intuition to the history of visually realistic representations of black hole shadows. Text framing early representations of this kind would often distinguish between the apparent position of light near a black hole and its actual position when describing the deflection of light. Through interchange between text and image, researchers focused on the unusual behaviour of light in this region in order to explain the nature of what cannot be seen. First, I trace the history of visual and textual representations used to make spaces around black holes intuitive to readers, from early representations drawing on calculations and simulations to the present-day observations. I then focus on accounts from researchers tied to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the collaboration which released the first observation of the shadow of a black hole in 2019. When discussing the use of images to provide intuition of black holes, we find a wide range of views within the collaboration which first produced images on the basis of observation: some argue that images of light near black holes are in fact counterintuitive, and others describe various ways in which images can help further intuition about black holes in research and communication to audiences of varying degrees of specialization. |
Sunday, April 10, 2022 9:42AM - 10:18AM |
G03.00003: Visualizing and Historicizing Cosmic Radiation Invited Speaker: Connemara Doran As knowledge producers, visualizations of astrophysical phenomena – the images produced by a concatenation of technological means and the physiological-cognitive processes of viewing and interpreting such images – depend upon light as an instrument, a messenger, and (often but not always in the age of multi-messenger astronomy) the object under observation and interrogation. This talk examines the epistemic roles of images produced by highly sensitive instruments on NASA's COBE and WMAP and ESA's Planck spacecraft which made visible the universe's very first light: the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Their iconic images mapped the universe's embryonic structure, modeled the evolution of cosmic structure from the big bang to today, and provided constraints on fundamental astrophysical parameters. To educate and prefigure the pending two-dimensional visual (digital) icons, the science teams at the respective space agencies made publicly available three-dimensional physical models, computer simulations, cartoons on postcards, and interactive digital media that have engaged various overlapping communities. The nine years of WMAP data comprising the iconic images were immediately archived online for scientific and public use, and the iconic "Evolution of the Universe" visualization has sparked productive questioning throughout the physics community and beyond. Most recently, the new observational techniques of Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) seek to produce three-dimensional maps of the large-scale structure of the universe across its history. Throughout, tensions exist between the epistemic and the ontic: as precision measurements have narrowed the uncertainty in our understanding of cosmic evolution, the nature of the basic constituents of our universe remains under contention. |
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