Caltech researchers have built
the first three-dimensional recreation of a flare surrounding the Milky Way’s
supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. The surrounding environment of a black
hole is extremely chaotic. For instance, hot, magnetized gas spirals in a disk
at incredibly high speeds. Mysterious flares may appear within this tumultuous
disk and then rapidly disappear. The researchers sought to create a 3D video of
flares around the black hole. However, the 3D creation was more complex than expected.
The scientists used cutting-edge computational imaging methods to create a
technique that includes light bending caused by the black hole’s tremendous
gravity. The approach, known as neural radiance fields (NeRF), enhances
computer graphics.
It incorporates deep learning to
create a three-dimensional representation of a scene from two-dimensional
images. This allowed the scientists to rebuild the 3D environment surrounding a
black hole. The NeRF algorithm demonstrated its capacity to properly
reconstruct detailed flare-like feature’s movement around a black hole’s event
horizon. This approach may aid scientists in future exploration and research of
the black hole’s surroundings. The researchers also used data from Chile’s
Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) for the reconstruction. ALMA does not
capture a single light curve but offers videos for each observation. They also
confirmed their three-dimensional structure results by determining whether they
were consistent with the ALMA data.
More information:
https://interestingengineering.com/space/3d-reconstruction-of-milky-ways-black-hole-flare-unveiled
