Scientists created millions of black holes in supercomputer simulations.
combines petabytes of data from eight radio telescopes distributed all over the world; advanced computer algorithms then go to work to turn all this disparate data into a false-color image.. Chan is an astronomer at Arizona's Steward Observatory and leads the EHT collaboration's project to build a library of millions of simulations of black holes, which can then be compared to a picture of the real thing.
Creating these simulations was almost as complex as taking the real images themselves. To assemble the library, astronomers enlisted the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and other similar instruments. All told, the project relied on 80 million CPU hours' worth of processing time — equivalent to 2,000 laptops running at full speed non-stop for a whole year — to produce 5 million simulated images.
"It is remarkable that we understand Sagittarius A* so well that we have some models pass 10 out of the 11 tests," Chan said. However, none pass all 11 — there was always something the researchers could not explain. In particular, most of the models seemed to stumble over the amount of turbulence-induced variability seen in the disk of hot plasma encircling Sagittarius A*. The real black hole appeared to be much quieter than the simulations predicted.
This is a feature of Sagittarius A* that scientists are still trying to understand, although Chan does not think that a little mystery is a bad thing.
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