Forget the black hole picture—check out the sweet technology that made it possible.
The Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of a black hole at the center of galaxy M87. The technology used to see the black hole is just as impressive as the black hole itself.Today, a black hole observed … tomorrow, a pothole avoided?images ever taken of a black hole — a gravitational sinkhole in space powerful enough to suck in even light itself. Capturing those images was an amazing feat.
To get a picture of the black hole, itself, the EHT project used a network of 10 Earthbound radio telescopes, linked together to function as a single system. The telescopes collected high-frequency radio waves from space, and four independent teams of scientists used algorithms to convert the radio signals into visual images.
The problem: That global megatelescope is still producing data as holey as a slice of Swiss cheese. The telescopes are collecting photons — packets of light — that fall from space like the proverbial pennies from heaven. But even working together, they can only catch a tiny sampling of those photons. Reconstructing an image from that sparse data set represents a challenge as massive as the black hole itself, Weintroub told me.
The algorithms the EHT scientists built help restrain that infinite number of possible images by sorting out which results were physically plausible and which were wildly unlikely. For example, Blackburn told me, the algorithms all tended to favor the images that could explain the measurements taken by the telescopes in the simplest possible way, weeding out the images with lots of fine detail or complicated features.
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