MIT graduate student Katie Bauman and her team have developed an algorithm to help us finally see what a black hole actually looks like. All images of black holes that you have ever seen, including the one above, are in fact ordinary artistic interpretations (vision, or fiction, if you will).
To get a real image of, say, a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, we need an incredible telescope with a lens diameter almost equal to the diameter of our planet. It is impossible to build a thing of this size, so Bauman's algorithm, called Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction, or CHIRP, can come to the rescue, which will be built on a database received from the Event Horizon Telescope. …
The event horizon telescope brings together many radio telescopes around the world. Such power allows not only to break through dense cosmic clouds of gas and dust, but also to achieve maximum image resolution. For the sake of interest, we note that astronomers are already accustomed to considering this array as a single whole, one giant telescope the size of the Earth. But it's not that simple. The problem is that not all telescopes from this giant array are capable of receiving data at the same time. The reason for this is all the same cosmic dust. The CHIRP algorithm can solve this problem. It is able to filter out all atmospheric noise that interferes with the signal flow, and in the end create an image from the received data that is much cleaner than other similar algorithms offer.
One of the authors of the algorithm, Michael Johnson, joked in an interview with PopSci that thanks to this algorithm, scientists will now "be able to make real films about what black holes eat." But for a start, it would be nice to get at least a static image of this unique cosmic phenomenon and finally make sure if real black holes really have something in common with what we could see in Interstellar.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK
