One interesting thing about dim holes is that , well , we ’ve never actually seen one . In fact , our only direct evidence that they be came from the discovery ofgravitational waveslast year , in the form of two merging black holes .
But stargazer are now prepare to produce animage of a black hole , Sagittarius A * at the center of our Milky Way , thanks to an international collaboration called theEvent Horizon Telescope(EHT ) . It will use nine radio telescope around the world to create a virtual scope with a much wide area , known as interferometry .
To make this work , though , requires a chip of shenanigan , and that ’s where a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) come in . They ’ve develop an algorithm ( described in apaper ) that uses other icon of quad to create a mosaic of the combined data-based datum . It ’s called CHIRP ( Continuous High - resolving Image Reconstruction using Patch prior ) , and the consequence is that it should permit us directly image a inglorious hole .
“ Suppose you want a high - resolution video of a baseball , ” Yoav Schechner , a professor of electrical technology at Israel ’s Technion who was not demand in the paper , toldMIT News . “ The nature of ballistic flight is prior noesis about a ball ’s flight . In essence , the anterior noesis constrain the sought unknowns . Hence , the exact commonwealth of the clump in space - fourth dimension can be well dictated using sparsely capture data . ”
One of the reasons we need such a magnanimous telescope is that black golf hole are very far away , and also very small-scale . For exemplar , Sagittarius A * is just 17 clip the Sun ’s diameter but 25,000 light - years away .
“ [ engage a picture of the black kettle of fish in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy is ] equivalent to take an image of a grapefruit on the Moon , but with a radio telescope , ” said MIT alum Katie Bouman , who precede the algorithm ’s development , to MIT News . “ To image something this little means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000 - kilometer diameter , which is not practical , because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometre . ”
Using telescopes around the domain will let uranologist in the EHT project achieve such a resolution . And the new CHIRP algorithm will be essential in piecing together all the observations to make this ambitious endeavor possible .
There ’s no loyal date in 2017 for when we can gestate the first image yet , but there ’s every reason to be excited for when it does get up and run .
