MIT Researchers Develop New Algorithm For Black Hole Imaging

Nobody can see a black hole because of a number of factors. It is a known fact that nothing gets out of a black hole, including light. Hawking radiation explains how anything that falls into a black hole gets heated up as it falls through it.

The same phenomenon can be witnessed with the help of a good radio telescope, however, because of the huge distance of the black holes from Earth, that is practically not feasible. The only thing that makes it possible to view a heated up particle moving through a black hole is a telescope with an angular resolution much greater than the telescopes that scientists currently have on Earth.

According to researcher Katie Bouman of MIT, viewing a black hole from Earth is like taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon with the help of a radio telescope. To image such a small object, a telescope of an approximate diameter of 10,000 kilometres will be required. This is not practically possible since the diameter of Earth itself is around 13,000 kilometres.

This is the reason why Bouman collaborated with an international team of researchers to use the principles of interferometry to develop a new imaging algorithm called Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP).

The use of interferometry allows the scientists to "turn the entire planet into a large radio telescope dish." The collaboration called The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an array of radio telescopes. It is working on imaging of Sagittarius A, a black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The black hole cannot be viewed directly with the help of normal optics because of the presence of excessive amount of debris in the way. This drawback is taken care of by EHT that derives input from a series of radio telescoped to come up with an image. This type of telescope has much better angular resolution that any other optical means and uses inferometry to find out what a black hole really looks like.