![]() But they’re two views of the same black hole. These two images might look like different things: one a fat, blurry orange doughnut, the other the sinuous noose on the end of a lariat. Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), D. Future work could pin down these kinds of structures and use them to learn more about the material accreting onto the black hole. ![]() It might be matter swirling around the black hole and falling in. The tail at the bottom might or might not be a real feature, as it changes quite a bit depending on the analysis. It was a stunning confirmation of the general theory of relativity, showing that those predictions hold up even in extreme gravitational environments.The original image from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration of the shadow of the black hole M87* (left), compared with a new version generated by the PRIMO algorithm (right). And just as the size of the event horizon is proportional to the black hole's mass, so, too, is the black hole's shadow: the more massive the black hole, the larger the shadow. That shadow is as close as astronomers can get to taking a picture of the actual black hole, from which light cannot escape once it crosses the event horizon. The imaging also revealed the shadow of the black hole, a dark central region within the ring. From this, astronomers deduced that the black hole is spinning clockwise. The EHT captured photons trapped in orbit around the black hole, swirling around at near the speed of light, creating a bright ring around it. Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year. It was a feat that would have been impossible a mere generation ago, made possible by technological breakthroughs, innovative new algorithms, and of course, connecting several of the world's best radio observatories. Advertisementīack in 2019, the EHT made headlines with its announcement of the first direct image of a black hole, located in the constellation of Virgo, some 55 million light years away. The telescope is created by a process called interferometry, which uses light captured at different locations to build an image with a resolution that is the equivalent of a giant telescope (a telescope so big, it’s as if it were as large as the distance between the most distant locations of the individual telescopes). Instead, it's a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe, including hardware from Hawaii to Europe, and from the South Pole to Greenland, though not all of these were active during the initial observations. “It provides a way to compensate for the missing information about the object being observed, which is required to generate the image that would have been seen using a single gigantic radio telescope the size of the Earth.”Īs we've reported previously, the EHT isn't a telescope in the traditional sense. ![]() “PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of constructing images from EHT observations,” said co-author Tod Lauer (NOIRLab). They described their achievement in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Now four members of the EHT collaboration have applied a new machine-learning technique dubbed PRIMO (principal-component interferometric modeling) to the original 2017 data, giving that famous image its first makeover. But there were still gaps in the observational data, limiting the resolution the EHT was able to achieve. The iconic image of a supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy-described by astronomers as a "fuzzy orange donut"-was a stunning testament to the capabilities of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). ![]()
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