This technology may finally help us figure out what black holes really look like

For the first time, scientists might find out because of a machine-learning algorithm -- one that pieces together image data collected from multiple radio telescopes scattered around the globe. If it works, artificial intelligence will have contributed to our first non-artist rendering of a captivating scientific mystery. No single telescope is up for the job, because none is big enough to produce a high-quality image. And we will never build one, said Katie Bouman, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Harvard researchers on what's called the Event Horizon Telescope. "A black hole is very, very far away and very compact," Bouman said in an MIT blog post. To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers."