00:00This is the first image of a black hole ever taken, captured only back in 2019.
00:09The image of black hole M87 was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope, and at the time was
00:14an epic moment in astronomy.
00:16But now, using machine learning AI, researchers just made that very image even sharper.
00:21This is the new and improved version of the 2019 picture, upscaled by an algorithm called
00:25PRIMO, or the Principal Component Interferomatic Modeling Program.
00:29Finding images of black holes is difficult for a multitude of reasons, not least of which
00:33is that they gobble up anything that passes over their event horizons, even light.
00:37But even the closest black holes are over a thousand light years away.
00:40In fact, this one, housed in the Messier 87 galaxy, is 55 million light years away.
00:46Though the one advantage astronomers have in finding black holes is their size.
00:49In the case of M87, it's 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, which is not only how
00:55experts were able to detect it, but also how the machine learning was able to fill in the
00:58gaps and transform the image.
01:00The AI was trained using some 30,000 images of simulated black holes, allowing it to work
01:05out different patterns to find the one that would fit just right for M87.
01:09With one of the astrophysicists working on the project saying about it, quote, if a picture
01:13is worth a thousand words, the data underlying that image have many more stories to tell.
01:17PRIMO will continue to be a critical tool in extracting such insights.
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