Why every picture of a black hole is an illustration - Vox

[Trixil]

[video=youtube;v9gPAj7lXU0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9gPAj7lXU0[/video]
as a huge space nerd, i am really excited about knowing we'll be seeing a black hole for the first time

[Drury]

So much data it has to be flown by airplanes? Are we talking black holes or "xXX HUGE BLACK HOLE INSERTIONS ANTHOLOGY XXx"?

[Curls]

So they are hot steamy gaping holes for you to insert your matter inside

[JohnnyMo]

[QUOTE=Drury;50681485]So much data it has to be flown by airplanes? Are we talking black holes or "xXX HUGE BLACK HOLE INSERTIONS ANTHOLOGY XXx"?[/QUOTE]

Cutting-edge science produces insane amounts of data. For instance, before they filter out uninteresting events, the raw data produced at the Large Hadron Collider is about 600TB per second.

Luckily they filter so much it only ends up being about 100-200 MB/s.

[Toro]

[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;50681854]Cutting-edge science produces insane amounts of data. For instance, before they filter out uninteresting events, the raw data produced at the Large Hadron Collider is about 600TB per second.

Luckily they filter so much it only ends up being about 100-200 MB/s.[/QUOTE]

How is this data written? Unless its filtered before its stored, I can't see scientists trying to transfer 600TB/s to a (massive) array of consumer harddrives.

[JohnnyMo]

[QUOTE=Toro;50681869]How is this data written? Unless its filtered before its stored, I can't see scientists trying to transfer 600TB/s to a (massive) array of consumer harddrives.[/QUOTE]

It's filtered in two stages. The first cuts the data down by more than a factor of 10,000, and it's only stored in memory after that. Then another filtering phase cuts it down further.

[DOG-GY]

They also have an international network distributed from CERN to a ton of locations:
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid[/url]

[paramud]

[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;50681854]Cutting-edge science produces insane amounts of data. For instance, before they filter out uninteresting events, the raw data produced at the Large Hadron Collider is about 600TB per second.

Luckily they filter so much it only ends up being about 100-200 MB/s.[/QUOTE]

And it still ends up being so large that trying to send it digitally would take longer than just shipping it on a portable drive.

[StrawberryClock]

This isn't surprising. Moving large amounts of data will always be faster by transport than an internet transfer. When Google needs to move an entire data center it's just easier to ship it on HDDs.