It's been a severe solar storm over the past days, K-index peaking up to 8 and 9 and aurora visible far, far south.  Has anyone taken pictures from unusual areas?

Snow storm instead of solar storm here currently in Oslo, but we've had a decent share of aurora this winter anyway.

Yep, that's the right intuition! There's just one catch, which is what we encountered before: even though hypothetically the distant observer should continue catching signals for the remaining lifetime of the hole, in practice there won't be much of an image or a detection at such late times after ...

Imagine the bob being swept down the drain, while the drain gets closed extremely slowly (closing up long after the bob went down it). What does this look like to the bob, the wave sensor, and the "global observer" who has the ability to see everything?

This analogy implies that the sensor will ...

I don't think saying that they vanish into extreme spacetime warping is quite the right way to describe it, because the space time curvature at the event horizon is finite, and actually quite weak for a supermassive black hole. The bigger the hole, the weaker the curvature at its horizon, which is ...

AI generated art is fascinating. I gave Midjourney the prompt "SpaceEngine", and below is what it thinks. This takes procedural generation to a new level. Some physical impossibilities, but pretty impressive what it can dream up nevertheless.

midtskogen_spaceengine_25187538-572c-4720-bdd6 ...

Thanks, Wats, this is excellently put. I think the point you're making that to the distant observer the astronaut actually disappears quickly both due to intensity loss and redshift, and is so utterly lost in Hawking radiation much much sooner than evaporation becoming a factor, is quite important ...

Below is what Chat-GPT had to say on the matter. But it didn't really give an answer to my question. It rather simply agreed to my assertions.


The black hole information paradox is one of the most fascinating and challenging problems in modern physics. One of the proposed solutions to this ...

The forums are so silent these days, so here's a challenge question, something I certainly struggle to wrap my head around. For a distant observer it will take an infinite time to see an astronaut fall into a black hole. But it will take a finite time for the same observer to see the black hole ...

It's interesting how on almost every metric that nations are measured by, the Scandanavian nations (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland) lead the pack, whether it's longevity (highest), income disparity (lowest), social mobility (highest), healthcare (highest), literacy rate (highest ...

Timing is important. If you want to judge the effectiveness of lockdowns, we should look at the time frame where lockdowns were the most important factor. That was during spring and summer of 2020. Sweden's excess mortality rate then was higher than almost anywhere else in Europe except Great ...

Covid is not gone, but enough time has passed to evaluate the countermeasures like lockdowns, social distancing, face masks. The following statistics is interesting. As we know, Sweden remained largely open. This does not mean that everything was business as usual, individual common sense could have ...

100 lux is quite a bit more than what is used for a well lit highway, and can you see the Milky Way when driving on the highway? No, and you wouldn't easily see it on Pluto either, even assuming that there is no atmosphere brightening the sky. The eyes need time to adapt.

The eclipse analogy is ...

Thanks, so video is best?

I posted the video from which that image is taken here.  Not a dramatic display, though.

Mid did you see these Northern Lights? They are absolutely amazing!

I wonder what camera settings are needed for these?

I occasionally checked the cameras and looked out of the window to see for myself. I live 100 km away from these cameras or so. But it's too much light pollution here to see ...

Jupiter and Venus had a close encounter yesterday. I could watch them set in the video from the meteor camera when they were 0.52 and 0.50 degrees below the horizon. This is partly due to refraction, partly due to the Earth's curvature. Thanks to their brightnesses they were still clearly visible ...