Scientists Unveil New and Improved 'Skinny Donut' Black Hole Image (reuters.com) 18
The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry -- or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole -- a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy -- mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. From a report: Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape. The ring of light -- that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object -- seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.
The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).
The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).
Uh oh (Score:2)
SpaghettiO vs Diet SpaghettiO
What makes this (Score:2)
Isn't this just feeding a handful of data points into a machine learning algorithm (can we please stop calling this stuff "AI" already) and generating an image from that, not entirely dissimilar from D
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There are techniques that have been developed for improving resolution across multiple images taken over time of the same subject. It has even been possible to use these techniques to reconstruct pixelate-filtered censored images if the pixelation isn't too extreme.
If I understand correctly they're able to analyze what remains the same and what changes over the course of processing the images, to extrapolate the details that no single image manages to capture.
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You think you're going to get a sharp edge on a cloud of gas in space at 27,000 light years?
Re: What makes this (Score:2)
Re:What makes this (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly I trust that these researchers know what they are doing, but the aspect of what exactly the algorithm is doing and why we think it is trustworthy doesn't seem to get much mention.
I haven't worked directly in science for a couple decades, but in my opinion - people can be world leaders in their particular field of scientific endeavor, but still not know much about data analysis in general. My old lab director was pretty good in knowing what was in his wheelhouse and what wasn't; but he'd occasionally show me papers from others (he was peer reviewing) where these well-known scientists would make analytical inferences they really couldn't support.
It was a lot like the Slashdot meme where #3 is "???" and #4 is "profit!" - except with much more scientific jargon.
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From the very end of TFA:
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My biggest concern (Score:2)
I do tend to wonder if they're introducing detail that doesn't really exist (or that they have no valid grounds to assume exists, based on the data actually collected).
So..... slightly less blurry. (Score:2)
Really. A blurry image is now less blurry. News at 11.
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I suspect one of these days the UFO hanger at Area 51 will be exposed to the public, and all the ships will have fuzzy boundaries. Then all the skeptics who said "photos must be fake because nobody wants to get a clear shot" would sound a worldwide "Doh!"
So maybe black holes are just inherently blurry.
Summary (Score:2)
New and improved! Now looks more like a hole.
Skinny Donut around black holes? (Score:2)
If I was surrounded by "Skinny Donuts", my mass and size would be increasing too!
Some troll could link goatse and (Score:1)
...nobody would know the diff this time.
They don't like "skinny donut" (Score:2)
Why not call it an onion ring?
Image using a technique based on a simulation ... (Score:2)
... yes, the machine learning technique used (PRIMO) was trained on simulation data. And the original image itself was derived from the actual image data based on several assumptions made on what we currently think black holes should be like; yes they refined the original image until it aligned with what simulations said it should look like. So this _latest_ image is based on a series of guesses and assumptions applied to a series of guesses and assumptions, rather than being an actual image of a black h