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The first photo never taken from a black hole seems a little clearer now.
Originally released in 2019, the unprecedented The historic image of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy Messier 87 captured an essentially invisible celestial object using direct imagery.
The image presented the first direct visual proof that there are black holes, presenting a dark central region encapsulated by a light ring which looks brighter on one side. Astronomers have nicknamed the object “blurred and orange donut”.
Now scientists have used automatic learning to give the image a cleaner upgrade that looks more like a “meager” donut, researchers said. The central region is darker and larger, surrounded by a light ring while hot gas falls into the black hole in the new image.
In 2017, astronomers decided to observe the invisible heart of the Massive Galaxy Messier 87, or M87, near the Virgo Galaxy group 55 million light years from the earth.
The collaboration on the Horizon Event telescopes, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes which captured the first photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers worked on the project for more than a decade. The project was appointed for the horizon of the event, the border proposed around a black hole which represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.
To capture an image of the black hole, scientists combined the power of seven radio stations in the world using a very long ride interferometry, according to the Southern European Observatory, which is part of the EHT. This table Effectively created a virtual telescope around the same size as the earth.
The 2017 original observation data was combined with an automatic learning technique to enter the full resolution of what telescopes have seen for the first time. The new more detailed image, as well as a study, were published Thursday in Astrophysical newspaper letters.
“With our new automatic learning technique, Primo, we were able to obtain the maximum resolution of the current network,” said the author of the main study Lia Medeiros, astrophysical postdoctoral scholarship at the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in in Princeton, New Jersey, in a press release.
“Since we cannot study black holes closely, the detail of an image plays an essential role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and our gravity tests. ”
MEDEIROS and other EHT members have developed main-component interferometric modeling, or first. The algorithm is based on learning the dictionary in which computers create rules based on large quantities of equipment. If a computer receives a series of images from different bananas, combined with training, it could be able to know if an unknown image contains or does not contain bananas.
Computers using Primo have analyzed more than 30,000 simulated high resolution images of black holes to choose common structural details. This allowed automatic learning to fill the gaps in the original image.
“Primo is a new approach to the difficult task of building images of EHT observations,” said Tod Lauer, astronomer at the National Research Laboratory on Infrared Astronomy with National Infrared, or Noillab. “It provides a way to compensate for the missing information on the observed object, which is necessary to generate the image that would have been seen using a single radio-telescope radiotelescope the size of the earth.”
Black holes are made up of huge amounts of material tight in a small area, according to NasaCreating a massive gravitational field that attracts everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial phenomena also have a way to overheat the material that surrounds them and distort space-time.
The material accumulates around black holes, is heated to billions of degrees and almost reaches the speed of light. Light folds around the gravity of the black hole, which creates the photon ring seen in the image. The shadow of the black hole is represented by the dark central region.
The visual confirmation of black holes also acts as a confirmation of the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein. In theory, Einstein predicted that the dense and compact spaces of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape them. But if materials heated in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the horizon of the event could be visible.
The new image can help scientists make more precise measurements of the mass of the black hole. Researchers can also apply Primo to other EHT observations, including those of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
“The image of 2019 was only the start,” said Medeiros. “If an image is worth a thousand words, the data underlying this image have many more stories to tell. Primo will continue to be a critical tool to extract such ideas. ”
