Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news of fascinating discoveries, scientific advances and more.
CNN
—
The first image ever taken of a black hole now looks clearer.
Originally released in 2019, it is unprecedented A historic photo of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 captured a basically invisible celestial body. Using live photography.
The image provided the first direct visual evidence of the existence of black holes, showing a dark central region enveloped by a ring of light that appears brighter on one side. Astronomers named the object the “Mysterious Orange Donut.”
Scientists have now used machine learning to give the image a sharper upgrade that looks more like a “skinny” donut, the researchers said. The central region is darker and larger, and is surrounded by a bright ring where hot gas falls into the black hole in the new image.
In 2017, astronomers set out to observe the invisible core of the massive galaxy Messier 87, or M87, near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first image of a black hole. More than 200 researchers worked on the project for more than a decade. The project is named after the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that marks the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.
To take an image of the black hole, scientists combined the power of seven radio telescopes around the world using Very Long Baseline Interferometry, according to the European Southern Observatory, part of the EHT. This matrix He succeeded in creating a virtual telescope the same size as the Earth.
Data from the original 2017 observation was combined with machine learning technology to capture the full resolution of what the telescopes saw for the first time. The new, more detailed image was released with the study On Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Thanks to a new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve maximum resolution of the existing array,” said Lea Medeiros, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at the School of Natural Sciences at the US Institute for Advanced Study. Princeton, New Jersey, in a statement.
“Since we cannot study black holes up close, the details of the image play a crucial role in our ability to understand their behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now approximately twice smaller, which will pose a strong constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”
Medeiros and other members of the EHT developed principal components interference modeling, Or primo. The algorithm is based on dictionary learning where computers create rules based on large amounts of material. If a computer is given a series of images of different bananas, plus some training, it might be able to tell whether the unknown image contains a banana or not.
Computers using PRIMO analyzed more than 30,000 high-resolution simulated images of black holes to pick out common structural details. This essentially allowed machine learning to fill in the gaps of the original image.
“PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of creating images from EHT observations,” said Todd Loyer, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s National Infrared Optical Astronomy Research Laboratory. NOIRLab. “It provides a way to compensate for missing information about the object being observed, which is required to create the image that would have been seen with a single giant Earth-sized radio telescope.”
Black holes consist of huge amounts of matter compressed into a small space, according to the American “Space” website NASAThis creates a massive gravitational field that attracts everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial phenomena also have a way of heating up the material around them and distorting space-time.
Material accretes around black holes, heating up to billions of degrees and reaching almost the speed of light. The light is bent around the black hole’s gravity, creating the photon ring seen in the image. The shadow of the black hole represents the dark central region.
Optical confirmation of black holes also serves as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In this theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compressed regions of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape from them. But if hot material in the form of plasma surrounds the black hole and emits light, the event horizon could be visible.
The new image could help scientists make more accurate measurements of the black hole’s mass. Researchers can also apply PRIMO to other EHT observations, including those of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
“The 2019 photo was just the beginning,” Medeiros said. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the data behind that picture has a lot of stories to tell. Primo will continue to be a crucial tool in distilling such insights.”