(CNN) The first captured photo of the black hole now looks a little sharper.
Originally released in 2019. Unprecedented Historic image of supermassive black hole at center of galaxy Messier 87 captures essentially invisible celestial object Use of live images.
The image provided the first direct visual evidence for the existence of black holes, showing a central dark region surrounded by a ring of light that appeared brighter on one side. Astronomers have dubbed the object the “Fuzzy Orange Donut.”
Now the scientists used machine learning to render the image as a “thin” donut with a neater update, the researchers said. In the new image, the central region is dark and massive, surrounded by a bright ring as hot gas falls into the black hole.
A machine learning technique was used to enhance the Event Horizon Telescope’s (left) composite image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, producing a sharper image.
In 2017, astronomers set out to observe the invisible core of the massive galaxy Messier 87, or M87, near the constellation Virgo, 55 million light-years from Earth.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, known as EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first image of a black hole. More than 200 researchers have worked on the project for more than a decade. The diagram is named for the event horizon, a proposed boundary around a black hole that represents a space where light or radiation cannot escape.
To capture the image of the black hole, scientists combined the power of seven radio telescopes around the world using very long baseline interferometry, the European Southern Observatory, part of the EHT. This episode Efficiently create a virtual Earth-sized telescope.
The “maximum resolution” has been reached
Original observational data from 2017 was combined with a machine learning technique to capture the full resolution of what telescopes first saw. A new detailed image was released along with a study Thursday Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Using our new PRIMO machine learning technique, we were able to achieve the highest resolution of the current sequence,” said the study’s lead author, Leah Medeiros. Princeton, New Jersey, in a statement.
“Because we can’t study black holes up close, the detail of an image plays an important role in our ability to understand their behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now twice as small, and this is a severe limitation on our theoretical models and gravitational experiments. »
Medeiros and other EHT members have developed interferometric modeling of principal components, or PRIMO. The algorithms rely on dictionary learning, in which computers generate rules based on large sets of objects. When a computer receives a series of images of different bananas, combined with some training, it can determine whether an unknown image contains a banana or not.
Computers using PRIMO analyzed more than 30,000 high-resolution simulated images of black holes to extract common structural details. This allowed machine learning to fill in the gaps in the original image.
“PRIMO is a novel approach to the difficult task of constructing images from EHT observations,” said astronomer Todd Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. NOIRLab. “This provides a way to compensate for missing information about the observed object that is needed to create an image that can be seen with a giant Earth-sized radio telescope. »
Promotion of black hole research
Black holes are made up of a large amount of matter compressed into a small area. Nasa creates a massive gravitational field that attracts everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial events have the ability to heat the matter around them and modify space-time.
Matter gathers around black holes, heating them up to billions of degrees, almost reaching the speed of light. The light bends around the black hole’s gravitational pull, creating the ring of photons seen in the image. The shadow of the black hole is represented by the dark central region.
The visual confirmation of black holes also serves as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In theory, Einstein predicted that the densest and most compact regions of space would have such a strong gravitational pull that nothing could escape. But when hot matter in the form of plasma surrounds the black hole and emits light, the event horizon becomes visible.
The new image will help scientists measure the black hole’s mass more accurately. Researchers can use PRIMO for more EHT observations The black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
“The 2019 film is just the beginning,” said Medeiros. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, the data underlying that picture has many more stories to tell. PRIMO will continue to be an important tool for gathering information. »