NEW YORK — The first image of a black hole captured four years ago revealed a fuzzy object shaped like a flaming doughnut. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to retouch this image of cosmic beauty.
The updated image, published Thursday in the journal “Astrophysical Journal Letters,” retains the original donut shape, but with a thinner ring and sharper resolution.
The image released in 2019 gave a glimpse of the massive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, 53 million light-years from Earth — one light-year is about 9.461 billion kilometers.
The initial image was made from data collected by a network of radio telescopes around the world showing swirls of light and gas.
But despite the collaboration of these many telescopes, gaps remained in the data. For their latest study, the scientists relied on the same data, but they used machine learning to fill in the gaps.
The resulting image resembles the original, but with a thinner “donut” and a darker center, the researchers point out.
“To me, it’s like we’re really seeing it for the first time,” said lead author Lia Medeiros, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.
By having a sharper image, the researchers hope to learn more about the properties and gravity of the black hole in further studies.
Lia Medeiros adds that the team plans to use machine learning on other images of celestial objects, including possibly the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.