Astronomers unveil new and improved image of supermassive black hole
Scientists used machine learning to fill in the pieces missing from previous version of the image to offer a more complete understanding of its mass.
Ariana Garcia
,
Chron
April 14, 2023
The first-ever direct image of a supermassive black hole went from "fuzzy, orange donut," to "skinny donut" thanks to some help from machine learning. On Thursday, a team of astronomers revealed a much sharper photo of the black hole, named M87, which is located 55-million light-years away in the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The new photo further exposes a larger, darker central region surrounded by bright accreting gas in a ring-like shape.
Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope first unveiled the image of M87, which harbors about the same mass as 6.5 billion Suns, back in 2019. They used a network of seven telescopes around the world to create an "Earth-sized telescope." But they still were unable to achieve a complete view of the black hole.
"Approximately four years after the first horizon-scale image of a black hole was unveiled by EHT in 2019, we have marked another milestone, producing an image that utilizes the full resolution of the array for the first time," said Dimitrios Psaltis, a researcher at Georgia Tech and a member of the EHT collaboration, in an Institute for Advance Study release. "The new machine learning techniques that we have developed provide a golden opportunity for our collective work to understand black hole physics."
https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/supermassive-black-hole-17895964.php
