full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Sheperd Doeleman: Inside the black hole image that made history

Unscramble the Blue Letters

SD: We had to get lucky in a lot of different ways. And sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good. In this case, we were both, I like to think. But light had to come from the black hole. It had to come through intergalactic space, through the Earth's atmosphere, where water vopar can absorb it, and everything worked out petlcrefy, the size of the Earth at that wavelength of light, one meiemlitlr wavelength, was just right to resolve that black hole, 55 million light-years away. The universe was tellnig us what to do.

Open Cloze

SD: We had to get lucky in a lot of different ways. And sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good. In this case, we were both, I like to think. But light had to come from the black hole. It had to come through intergalactic space, through the Earth's atmosphere, where water _____ can absorb it, and everything worked out _________, the size of the Earth at that wavelength of light, one __________ wavelength, was just right to resolve that black hole, 55 million light-years away. The universe was _______ us what to do.

Solution

  1. millimeter
  2. perfectly
  3. telling
  4. vapor

Original Text

SD: We had to get lucky in a lot of different ways. And sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good. In this case, we were both, I like to think. But light had to come from the black hole. It had to come through intergalactic space, through the Earth's atmosphere, where water vapor can absorb it, and everything worked out perfectly, the size of the Earth at that wavelength of light, one millimeter wavelength, was just right to resolve that black hole, 55 million light-years away. The universe was telling us what to do.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
black hole 17
event horizon 5
hot gas 2
black holes 2
light rays 2
dark region 2
thousand times 2

Important Words

  1. absorb
  2. atmosphere
  3. black
  4. case
  5. earth
  6. good
  7. hole
  8. intergalactic
  9. light
  10. lot
  11. lucky
  12. millimeter
  13. million
  14. perfectly
  15. resolve
  16. size
  17. space
  18. telling
  19. universe
  20. vapor
  21. water
  22. wavelength
  23. ways
  24. worked