Australian Astronomers Make Interstellar Hologram

KentuckyFC writes "Australian astronomers say the way a beam of light from a pulsar is scattered by interstellar dust is analogous to the way a hologram is made. But to reconstruct an image of this dust, you've got to know what the light was like before it was distorted. With an impressive piece of computer optimization, these astronomers have worked out the 8000 coefficients that determine the light field and so have been able to produce an image of the interstellar medium (abstract on the physics arXiv)."

Comments

Astronomers make hologram?

[BadMrMojo]

To be fair, it sounds like the pulsar and the interstellar dust did all the hard work. The Australian astronomers just managed to notice it.

Re:Astronomers make hologram?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...developing an algorithm that can simultaneously optimise the eight thousand coefficients that describe the electric field.

Yeah. That's the easy stuff.