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The first photo of a black hole now looks a little clearer.
Originally released in 2019unprecedented Historic image of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy Messier 87 captured an essentially invisible object Use direct imaging.
This image provides the first direct visual evidence that a black hole exists, showing a dark area in the center surrounded by a ring of light that appears brighter on one side. Astronomers named this object a “fluffy orange donut.”
This time, scientists used machine learning to upgrade the image to look more like a “skinny” donut, the researchers said. In the new image, as hot gas falls into the black hole, the central region becomes darker and larger, surrounded by a bright ring.
In 2017, astronomers began observing the invisible core of the giant galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located 55 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo cluster of galaxies.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, known as EHT, is the worldwide network of telescopes that took the first photo of a black hole. More than 200 researchers worked on this project for more than 10 years. This project is named after the event horizon. The event horizon is a proposed boundary around a black hole that represents a point of no return from which neither light nor radiation can escape.
To take images 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 array In effect, we created a virtual telescope the same size as Earth.
The first observation data from 2017 was combined with machine learning techniques to obtain the highest resolution ever seen by the telescope for the first time. New, more detailed images and research published on thursday Astrophysics Journal Letter.
“Using our new machine learning technology PRIMO, we were able to achieve the highest resolution of current arrays,” said study lead author and postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Natural Sciences. said Lia Medeiros. Princeton, New Jersey, said in a statement.
“Since we cannot study black holes up close, image details play an important role in understanding their behavior. The width of the ring in the image is about twice as small, which is what we will be a strong constraint for theoretical models and gravity tests.”
Medeiros and other EHT members developed principal component interference modeling. Or Primo. The algorithm relies on dictionary learning, where the computer creates rules based on large amounts of material. If you feed a computer a series of images of different bananas and combine it with some training, it might be able to determine whether an unknown image contains a banana.
Computers using PRIMO analyzed more than 30,000 high-resolution simulated images of black holes to find common structural details. This essentially allowed machine learning to fill in the gaps in the original image.
“PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of building images from EHT observations,” said astronomer Todd Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s National Institute for Optical and Infrared Astronomy. Noir Lab: “This provides a way to fill in the missing information about the observed object that would be needed to generate images that would have been observed using a single giant radio telescope the size of Earth.”
Black holes are made up of large amounts of matter squeezed into a small area. NASAcreates a huge gravitational field that pulls in everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial phenomena also have a way of overheating the matter around them and distorting space-time.
Matter accumulates around the black hole, heating it to billions of degrees and reaching nearly the speed of light. The light bends around the black hole’s gravity, creating the photon ring seen in the image. The shadow of a black hole is represented by a dark central region.
Visual confirmation of a black hole also serves as confirmation of a black hole. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In this theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compact regions of the universe would have a gravitational force so strong that no one could escape from it. But if heated matter in the form of plasma surrounds a black hole and emits light, the event horizon could be visible.
The new image will help scientists more accurately measure the black hole’s mass. Researchers can also apply PRIMO to other EHT observations. Black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
“The 2019 image was just the beginning,” Medeiros said. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the data underlying that image has many more stories to tell. PRIMO continues to be an important tool for unlocking such insights. Continue.”
