AI captures clearest picture of a black hole ever taken

Science buffs have been treated to the clearest picture of a black hole ever taken.

Artificial intelligence was used to improve the first snapshot of a black hole named M87, which was initially taken back in 2017.

Back then, the “fuzzy, orange” donut image of the spacetime region was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Now, the image has been updated using AI to give a clearer look at the fascinating feature at the centre of a nearby galaxy.

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Scientists hope the imagery will make it easier than ever to study the objects in the future.

“With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current array,” says lead author Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study, in a statement. “Since we cannot study black holes up-close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior."

Medeiros et al. 2023

“The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”

PRIMO stands for principal-component interferometric modeling and was developed by members of the EHT collaboration. The researchers describe the machine learning technology as well as the new image in a new paper, ‘The Image of the M87 Black Hole Reconstructed with PRIMO’, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It’s the second time in the matter of days that black holes are in the news, after a notable discovery began changing attitudes towards them in the scientific community.

Normally, we think of black holes as huge celestial objects with gravity strong enough to pull light from the universe. However, the latest one being observed is having exactly the opposite effect.

A "runaway" supermassive black hole has been spotted travelling at four million miles per hour away from its galaxy.

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