Space, glow around a black hole: the first 3D video ever developed

Thanks to the combination of data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, artificial intelligence technology has been developed The first 3D video showing what flares might look like around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) – Pronounced “sadge-ay-star” – the Giant black hole Which is located in the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. This was proven by the study conducted by A A group of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Published on “Natural Astronomy”. Scientists believe that the immediate environment surrounding the black hole is turbulent, with hot magnetized gas spiraling into the disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that mysterious glows occur within this disk up to several times a day, brightening temporarily and then fading. Results based on Data collected by ALMA, Chileover a period of 100 minutes immediately after the eruption seen in X-ray data on April 11, 2017, shows that the 3D structure of the flares is characterized by two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers, “the distance between the Earth and the Sun, from the center of the black hole.”

“This is the first 3D reconstruction of gas orbiting near a black hole,” he said. katie bowman, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, and Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. He said: “The video is not a simulation, but it is not a direct recording of events as they occur.” Aviad Levis, A postdoctoral fellow in Bowman’s group and lead author of the new work, a reconstruction based on our models of black hole physics. There is still a lot of uncertainty because it depends on the accuracy of these models.” L 3D image reconstruction, The research team had to evolve New computational imaging tools This could take into account, for example, the bending of light due to the curvature of space-time around objects with massive gravity, such as a black hole. An interdisciplinary group of scientists evaluated it for the first time Ability to create 3D video From flares around the black hole in June 2021 event horizon telescope, Or EHT, the Collaboration, to which Bowman and Levis belong, had already published the first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, called M87, and was working to do the same with EHT data from Sgr A*. .

Pratul Srinivasan, From Google Research, the co-author of the new work, who was visiting the Caltech group at the time, contributed to the development of a technique known as NeRF, or neural radiation fields, Which researchers were just starting to use at the time and has had a major impact on computer graphics ever since. NeRF is used Deep learning to create 3D representation A scene based on 2D images, providing a way to observe scenes from different angles, even when only limited views of the scene are available. The research team wondered whether, based on these recent developments in neural network representations, it would be possible to reconstruct the 3D environment around the black hole. By exploiting the behavioral predictability of gas surrounding a black hole, scientists have built a version of NeRF capable of taking into account the way gas moves around black holes and the way light bends around massive objects, such as black holes. Under the supervision of the co-author, andrew shell, The research team from Princeton University developed a computer model to simulate this curvature, also known as… Gravitational lens.