Hydrogen: A new image of the black hole created by the PRIMO algorithm (Photo: L. Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), D. Psaltis (Georgia Tech), T. Lauer (NSF's NOIRLab), and F. Ozel (Georgia Tech)) )
In 2019, the first photo of a massive black hole, also known as M87, collected by the Event Horizon Telescope array back in 2017, was revealed to the public.
At the time, the very documentation of a supermassive black hole made history by being the first time they managed to document a black hole in an image.
Now, that image has been processed by a special artificial intelligence trained to detect black holes.
The technology, called PRIMO for its acronym, is able to complete missing parts of the image, and allow the array of telescopes for the first time to have full resolution, despite optical gaps in their collection capabilities.
When the image of M87, which is 55 million light-years away and has a mass equal to 6.5 billion of our suns, was first published, scientists were surprised by how much it behaved according to Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity.
The improvement in the picture created by PRIMO allowed scientists to compare real-world observations with the theory's predictions.
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"PRIMO is a new approach to the difficult task of constructing images from observations of the EHT array," says Todd Lauer, a member scientist at the EHT.
The Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton University, who are responsible for PRIMO, explain that the intelligence works with lexical learning, which is a branch of machine learning that allows computers to create rules based on large sets of educational information. The team fed the system with 30,000 simulated
images
of black holes, created according to theoretical predictions about different types of black holes, and let PRIMO detect the patterns itself.
The patterns identified by PRIMO were sorted by their frequency in the simulations, and then applied to high-quality images of M87.
The patterns revealed details in the image that the Event Horizon telescope array missed.
The system's next task will be to study the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and other large black holes.
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