Tribute to the mirco/telescopic imaging techniques

On the occasion of the first image of black hole published yesterday, I write this tribute to memorize the achievements of modern technology in imaging the very far as well as the very small objects.

Imaging the very small – the atoms

 

A FIM image of PtAu alloy,
each white dot is an atom.

On Oct. 11st 1955, prof. Erwin W. Müller and his Ph.D. student Kanwar Bahadur captured the first image of individual atoms. That was an image of a sharply pointed tip of tungsten captured with the field ion microscope (FIM) invented by Müller in 1951. Read more about this milestone in this article: Atomic Imaging Turns 50

Later, many types of electron microscope had been advanced to the atomic resolution. Then in the early 1980s,  scanning tunneling microscope (STM, 1981) and atomic force microscope (AFM, 1982) were invented in IBM labs to image as well as to manipulate individual atoms. On April 30th 2013, IBM Research released the stop-motion animation "A Boy and His Atom" produced by maniputatling each molecule of carbon monoxide (CO) on the surface of a copper substrate and capturing frame-by-frame using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Excited hydrogen atom's orbital

On May 20th 2013, Aneta S. Stodolna et al. published a paper showing images of hydrogen atom's orbital excited by a direct current electric field, captured with a photoionization microscope, a kind of quantum microscope.

 

Imaging the very old – Big Bang, the birth of Universe

COBE's cosmic microwave background map

In 1992, the NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satelite released the first cosmic microwave background map as a result of its 4-year obsevation. This is the image of the Universe when it was just about 375,000 years old, and its temperature was about 3,000 Kelvin.

WMAP's cosmic microwave background map

20 years later, in 2012, the NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satelite released its 4-year obseving result a much more detailed map of the afterglow of the Big Bang, the birth of the Universe.

Plank's cosmic microwave background map

Then in 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Plank statelite refined the map with its release of 4-year ovbserving result.

 

Imaging the very fast – the speed of light

On Dec. 2011, MIT Media Lab published their slow-motion video capturing a packet of light (laser photon) passing through/over objects using their femtosecond camera (with trillion frames per second). And it's interesting to see the shadow of the apple appeared after the the apple was shined, only when the packet of light touched the wall.

 

Imaging the very far and massive – the black hole

Messier 87's black hole

On April 10th 2019,  Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team announced the first image of the (shadow) of a black hole, the supper massive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The M87 black hole weights 6.5 billion times our Sun's mass, and resides 55 million light-years away from us which requires a telescope of the size of the Earth to observe. To achieve the size of Earth, EHT team has combined 8 ground-based radio telescopes around the globe into a single system. The image shows the shadow of the black hole as a dark disk at the center of the glowing plasma of the accretion disk around the black hole.

All of these, the atom and its orbital, the Big Bang and its afterglow, the speed of light, and the black hole had been well known in theory and even had been applied in many fields long before they were directly captured in image. But when we can see them with our naked eyes, via images, we feel more confident about our knowledge and have more motivation to learn deeper about them.