The Theory of Black hole
Theory of relativity has got
proven again!
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest
scientists of all time once gave the formulas which predicted the existence of
the black hole and the nature of it. Until recent past, there were no evidences
and scientific proofs that the black hole really exists, but now bunch of PHD
students at MIT taking the help of hundreds of Terabytes of data have
successfully observed it, which is in turn a remarkable success for human
kind.
Capturing an image of a black
hole is not an easy task. A very high resolution camera is required that
can capture the centre of the galaxy, millions of light years away. To
give a comparison, a camera should be as powerful as to take an image of an
orange on the surface of the moon from the earth’s surface.
The high resolution image of an
orange at moon taken from earth contains 13000 pixels and each pixel contains
about roughly 1.5 million oranges. So, certainly to take a picture of a
black hole will require an earth size telescope according to some calculations.
Talking about the image which has
been captured, it is an outcome of data collected by 7 telescopes placed strategically
around the globe. Imagine an earth size disco ball with a telescope placed on
each mirror, this is the approximate telescopic power required to capture a
black hole but building a structure like this is literally impossible. Some of
students at MIT thought over and came up with a solution that even if they
build such a big telescope to deal with this type of ginormous data is
impossible. Before going in to the depth of understanding how image of black
hole is generated, we should know that the image is not a result of the visible
light emitting from the black hole but the telescope that actually captures the
radio waves and the distribution of it with regards to a specific wavelength.
Telescopes placed around the globe
collect the data of the radio waves at a specific wavelength and spectrum and
send it to the computer. The rotation of the earth helps to increase the
observable area to cover in the direction of black hole. This data is then sent
to the algorithms which later predict the shape and size of the black
hole. Katie Boumen, being a computer science graduate at MIT understood
the astronomical data and built an algorithm to create the understandable and
reasonable image out of the radio waves data collected by the telescope.
The Algorithm is purely based on
image processing and partition of the single image to thousands of sections. Since
there are infinite numbers of possibilities of the image, the code is developed
in such a way that it chooses the most likely image which humans can understand
and resembles the stuff in our universe. In simple words, thousands of images
captured by the telescope are divided into small pieces and each piece is
compared and ranked. Then those small pieces are combined to make a reasonable
image which is again ranked among other thousands of images and most likely
image is chosen as a result. The code was checked and simulated first
before taking it as a real implementation in the field.
This is how data science and
algorithms helped humans to take a picture of a black hole millions of light
years away. It is surprising to know that this light or radio waves which we
are observing is millions of years old. This connects us to the phenomena that
it is possible to know the origin of the universe if we are able to capture the
black hole. May be we will be needing a larger telescope and probably more
computing power to capture the radiation which were emitted far away in past to
come to know more about our universe. This is in fact a giant leap of the
mankind. But as it is said no matter how far in past we observe and how far in
future we predict the things; the universe lies within our self and we
just need to close eyes and introspect to get all the answers.
-By Jaydeep Sejpal
Rai University, Ahmedabad
No comments:
Post a Comment