Multimillion research to create the first ever 3D movies of black holes will combine pioneering international expertise in black hole imaging with cutting-edge artificial intelligence developed in the UK.

Dr Kazunori Akiyama has been awarded a £4 million Faraday Discovery Fellowship through the programme's Accelerated International Route, to be hosted by Heriot-Watt University. The project, named TomoGrav, brings together the pathbreaking expertise of Dr Kazunori Akiyama and Professor Yves Wiaux.

Dr Akiyama developed one of the computational imaging algorithms and co-led the entire imaging team as part of the wider Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration efforts to create the first images of black holes.   Professor Yves Wiaux’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence algorithms are transforming how scientists reconstruct images from incomplete data. 

Dr Akiyama and Professor Wiaux are supported by a multidisciplinary team of 10 world-renowned partners from across the world, whose combined expertise will deliver the work.

The funding will see Dr Akiyama move from his present role as a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory in the USA to Heriot-Watt University in Scotland as part of the scheme which provides long-term funding to talented mid-career researchers.

Using revolutionary imaging technology, the research is expected to transform understanding of the universe's most extreme environments by revealing how black holes behave and evolve across time.

Black holes are cosmic laboratories where gravity results as a byproduct of the warping of spacetime. Gas swirling around them is heated to extreme temperatures and accelerated to nearly light speed, generating powerful jets of magnetised plasma that are thought to influence the form of the largest scale structures in the universe.

The new research builds on the 2019 and 2022 photographs of two supermassive black holes, M87* and Sagittarius A*, which captivated billions of people worldwide and opened an entirely new scientific area which uses imaging to study gravity and black holes.

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