© via REUTERS / MEDEIROS ET AL. 2023
In year 2019 astronomers created a sensation. You could enter for the first time Black hole taking photos. The picture shows the center of the Galaxie M87, with its rings of light and the black hole at the center. A team of scientists has now been able to revise this image with the help of artificial intelligence.
© Medeiros et al. 2023
The program PRIMO sharpened the image. As a result, the reddish ring of light giving the black hole its “Donut“-shape, much narrower. For this, the AI was fed with all the data that the Event Horizon Teleskop 2017 had collected. At that time, a network was made 7 telescopes used all over the world.
Even when the 7 observatories are combined into one giant telescope, the data remains patchy. This is where PRIMO comes into play. “It gives us a way to compensate for the missing information about an object,” says Tod Lauderco-author of the study, in a statement. This allows an image to be generated that would be captured by a single, gigantic radio telescope the size of the entire earth.
Training with simulations
For this, PRIMO was awarded more than 30,000 simulated images trained by black holes with a glowing accretion disk of gas. The simulations present theories and information on how black holes attract material. The AI then identified patterns in these simulations.
“We use physics in a whole new way to supplement missing data with machine learning,” says the study leader Lia Medeiros. The result shows more clearly the glowing gas moving in a disk around the black hole. The Gravitation this galactic center is so strong that here almost Speed of Light is reached. This heats up the gas so that it glows.
center of the Milky Way
With the newly developed method, the image should help to determine the mass of the black hole more precisely. New insights into the gravitational pull of the black hole could also be obtained in this way. Next, PRIMO could take the photo of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Grade A*revise, that 2022 was presented. The study results are in the specialist magazine The Astrophysical Journal Letters appeared.
