![]() But this method uses timescales of days, and the source, in this case, is variable, changing in brightness throughout the observation period. WHAT’S NEW - The first black hole image was captured using very-long-baseline interferometry techniques, which employ multiple radio telescopes on the ground to collect signals from distant sources.ĮHT observed M87* during eight-hour cycles for seven days. Locations for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA). The resulting image revealed a crescent of hot gas and debris orbiting the black hole’s event horizon, the region of space directly surrounding a black hole from which nothing can escape. The telescopes gathered five petabytes, or 5,000 terabytes, of data, with around 350 terabytes collected each day of the observation period. Synchronized by custom-made atomic clocks, the international team behind the black hole image collected incoming radio signals from the distant black hole and logged the data on super-fast data recorders built specifically for the task. For comparison, Sagitarrius A* - the black hole at the center of our galaxy - is only about 2.6 million solar masses. The M87 black hole (the * in M87* differentiates it from the galaxy) is around 6.5 billion solar masses, or times the mass of the Sun. HERE’S THE BACKGROUND - The EHT comprises eight telescopes located on five continents.įor seven days in April 2017, the EHT collaboration pointed its telescope array towards a black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87, located 55 million light-years away from Earth. ![]() The team published its work Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. And now, in 2022, another team of scientists filled in the missing gaps in the original image, providing a reconstruction of the shadow of M87* over seven days in four dimensions. In 2021, a new image revealed polarized light in the giant cosmic maw. The image revealed the silhouette of black hole M87* surrounded by a glowing halo of hot gas. In 2019, a team of more than 200 astronomers using a global network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) accomplished what was seemingly impossible by releasing the first image of a black hole. Now, a just-published study sheds new light on a dark place. And if we have a smaller amount of matter falling in, it should create a thinner ring, right?" she says.On April 10, 2019, the world got its first look at a supermassive black hole. "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. 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).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |