【Katie Bouman】How to take a picture of a black hole (Part 1〜5)

Katie Bouman, TEDx talk, 2016
한국어 日本語

Katie Bouman's passion is coming up with ways to see or measure things that are invisible.

"How to take a picture of a black hole"

In the movie "Interstellar," we get an up-close look at a supermassive black hole. Set against a backdrop of bright gas, the black hole's massive gravitational pull bends light into a ring. However, this isn't a real photograph, but a computer graphic rendering -- an artistic interpretation of what a black hole might look like. 

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Theory of General Relativity and Black Holes

A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein first published his theory of general relativity. In the years since then, scientists have provided a lot of evidence in support of it. But one thing predicted from this theory, black holes, still have not been directly observed. Although we have some idea as to what a black hole might look like, we've never actually taken a picture of one before.

However, you might be surprised to know that that may soon change. We may be seeing our first picture of a black hole in the next couple years. Getting this first picture will come down to an international team of scientists, an Earth-sized telescope and an algorithm that puts together the final picture. Although I won't be able to show you a real picture of a black hole today, I'd like to give you a brief glimpse into the effort involved in getting that first picture. 

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Imaging Scientist Katie Bouman

My name is Katie Bouman, and I'm a PhD student at MIT. I do research in a computer science lab that works on making computers see through images and video. But although I'm not an astronomer, today I'd like to show you how I've been able to contribute to this exciting project.

If you go out past the bright city lights tonight, you may just be lucky enough to see a stunning view of the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you could zoom past millions of stars, 26,000 light-years toward the heart of the spiraling Milky Way, we'd eventually reach a cluster of stars right at the center. Peering past all the galactic dust with infrared telescopes, astronomers have watched these stars for over 16 years.

But it's what they don't see that is the most spectacular. These stars seem to orbit an invisible object. By tracking the paths of these stars, astronomers have concluded that the only thing small and heavy enough to cause this motion is a supermassive black hole -- an object so dense that it sucks up anything that ventures too close -- even light. 

But what happens if we were to zoom in even further? Is it possible to see something that, by definition, is impossible to see? Well, it turns out that if we were to zoom in at radio wavelengths, we'd expect to see a ring of light caused by the gravitational lensing of hot plasma zipping around the black hole. In other words, the black hole casts a shadow on this backdrop of bright material, carving out a sphere of darkness.

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Black Hole's Bright Ring 'Event Horizon'

This bright ring reveals the black hole's event horizon, where the gravitational pull becomes so great that not even light can escape. Einstein's equations predict the size and shape of this ring, so taking a picture of it wouldn't only be really cool, it would also help to verify that these equations hold in the extreme conditions around the black hole. 

However, this black hole is so far away from us, that from Earth, this ring appears incredibly small -- the same size to us as an orange on the surface of the moon. That makes taking a picture of it extremely difficult. Why is that? Well, it all comes down to a simple equation. Due to a phenomenon called diffraction, there are fundamental limits to the smallest objects that we can possibly see.

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This governing equation says that in order to see smaller and smaller, we need to make our telescope bigger and bigger. But even with the most powerful optical telescopes here on Earth, we can't even get close to the resolution necessary to image on the surface of the moon. In fact, here I show one of the highest resolution images ever taken of the moon from Earth. It contains roughly 13,000 pixels, and yet each pixel would contain over 1.5 million oranges.

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