GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers reanalyzed the original Event Horizon Telescope datasets using new imaging techniques, including machine learning and a separate statistical method, to check the accuracy of the famous 2019 black hole image. Published in Nature, their results closely match the original ring structure's diameter and orientation, though with some differences in fine details like ring width and brightness.
Researchers analyzed Event Horizon Telescope data from M87* collected in 2017, 2018 and 2021 using an independent interferometric observable to verify the black hole's shadow. The dataset included observations from multiple ground facilities across years, including new participants like the Greenland Telescope, Kitt Peak, and NOEMA, which improved coverage of the radio signal across the sky.
A team unaffiliated with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration reprocessed its original 2019 data using a different combination algorithm and published new images in Nature on 11 November. The results largely reproduce the famous ring-shaped shadow of the M87 black hole, countering a 2022 critique by Kobe University astrophysicist Junichiro Makino and colleagues, whose alternative analysis had produced a blob-like structure instead of a ring.
On a Quanta Magazine podcast, Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how he and roughly 250 researchers linked radio telescopes worldwide to form the Event Horizon Telescope, effectively turning Earth into a single giant instrument. That network produced the first-ever images of the supermassive black hole in galaxy M87, located about 55 million light-years away, and of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.