How did you shoot the black hole image?

On April 10 (local time), the first black hole photographs in human history were released and collected topics. At the same time, a female scientist who contributed to taking this picture gained attention. Katie Bouman, a MIT computer scientist. She devised an algorithm for a black hole shooting method. She has already introduced this through the 2017 TED, an MIT graduate student.

Bowman, first of all talking about the movie Interstellar, can see a super large black hole in a movie, and says that the huge gravitational force of a black hole in a movie makes it bent into a ring shape. Of course this is not a real photograph. It is an artifact of artistic interpretation.

A hundred years ago Albert Einstein first published the theory of general relativity. However, thereafter, the evidence for supporting general theory of relativity was presented, but only the black hole has never been observed directly. The idea of a black hole came out, but nobody has ever shot a black hole.

The black hole can be expected to have a lens around which a high temperature plasma exerts gravity, resulting in a ring of light. In other words, a black hole creates shadows in the background of bright substances and sculpts the area of darkness. The bright ring gravity becomes so strong that it reveals the horizon of a black hole that can not escape the light. Einstein ‘s equation predicts the size and shape of this ring. Taking this picture is not only a historical statement, but also a proof that this equation is maintained in extreme conditions around a black hole.

The problem is street. The small object that can be seen due to the phenomenon of diffraction has its fundamental limitations. According to this equation, the telescope must be made large to see small matter. If you calculate the size to see the black hole, you can see that you need a globe-sized telescope.

Of course, it is impossible to make earth-size single-plate telescopes. Event Horizon Telescope was an international collaboration to solve this problem. They work together by connecting several telescopes through network networks around the world. This will make the Earth-size telescope. It is like making the earth a huge rotating mirrorball.

Each mirror (telescope) collects light and collects the light into one to make an image. Images taken from multiple locations must go through the process of merging. Because the earth rotates, you can observe different parts of the image as the telescope changes its position like a rotating mirror ball.

The image algorithm she developed is for restoring the collected images. Just as a forensic sketch artist completes a picture based on a limited description of the face, the imaging algorithm is based on limited telescope data.

This algorithm ranks the images according to the likelihood of being a black hole image and selects the closest image. To do this, we looked at how different types of image features affect the reconstruction of the type image that was expected. If all types of photographs are combined through an algorithm, they can be confirmed that the image estimation result is not biased. Image algorithms combine image fragments like a puzzle. Through this process, we reconstruct the huge image data into image algorithms and create black hole images. For more information, please click here .