That means that image is what the black hole was like 55 million years ago," explains Bouman. The one we showed a picture of is 55 million light years away. "The black hole is really, really far away from us. Medeiros thinks that continued improvements in computer software and telescope hardware will result in the picture of the M87 black hole being refined more and more.Nonetheless, Bouman's research led to the creation of a new algorithm that allowed scientists to bring the black hole image to life, a task with a level of difficulty that cannot be overstated. It was also observed by this research consortium. That's also true for the only other black hole to have been imaged, the one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So far, everything still looks consistent with Albert Einstein's predictions. And if we have a smaller amount of matter falling in, it should create a thinner ring, right?" she says. "If we have more matter falling into the black hole, it'll create a thicker ring. It's a revelation that will help them understand what is happening as matter swirls around the black hole and falls in. "The fact that the ring width is smaller by about a factor of two is incredibly exciting," says Medeiros. And the resulting new image is consistent with the old one, but the ring of hot gasses swirling around the black hole is significantly thinner. Learning the correlations between the bits of the images helped them better fill in the gaps created by missing data, she says. It's not that each pixel is doing completely independent things." "If you have an image, the pixels close to any given pixel are not completely uncorrelated. And so we do this by analyzing tens of thousands of high-resolution images that are created from simulations," says Medeiros. "What we really do is we learn the correlations between different parts of the image. The researchers used tens of thousands of images generated by black hole simulations to train their machine learning program. That outline is what the EHT team was able to capture. Although the black hole itself can't be seen, its presence can be inferred from the effects of its gravity on its surroundings.įor example, the gas, dust, and debris that gets pulled into a black hole swirls around and heats up as it falls inward, creating an outline around the unseeable, insatiable beast. Astronomers now know that black holes can form when a dying star collapses in on itself. The idea of a celestial object with such strong gravity that it won't let light escape, rendering it invisible, has been around since the 18th century. J.Įven so, she says, "we're always going to be trying to improve and always going to be trying to have an ever-better image." I was really involved in making that image," says astrophysicist Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. "We're very, very proud and we're really excited about that image. Two years later, with much fanfare, the international EHT team announced they'd produced the first image of M87. This is the black hole that was observed in 2017 by a network of telescopes around the world known as the Event Horizon Telescope, which together acted as a giant radio telescope the size of the Earth. The picture shows the M87 black hole, a large one about 55 million light years away that's thought to be 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun. It looks much larger and darker in the upgraded image, according to a new report in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The black interior of this ring of hot gasses is an area of cosmic weirdness and such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape. The first iconic image of a black hole looked like a fuzzy, orange donut, but now that picture has been sharpened up to a fiery ring, thanks to computer simulations and machine learning. Researchers used computer simulations of black holes and machine learning to generate a revised version (right) of the famous first image of a black hole that was released back in 2019 (left).
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