Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 13 that, according to a new study published in Nature on November 11, an Australian research team used a new algorithm to confirm that the “doughnut” in humanity’s first black hole image, released in 2019 and featuring M87, is real.
The supermassive black hole M87* at the center of the M87 galaxy is about 55 million light-years from Earth. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released an image of it as humanity’s first black hole photograph. In the image, bright material surrounds a central dark region, resembling a “doughnut.” But because radio telescope data are sparse and calibration is complex, some researchers had questioned whether the ring structure was merely an “artifact” of the imaging algorithm or instrumental errors.
A team from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) developed an independent imaging method called GenDIReCT. Centered on “closure invariants,” it processes telescopes in groups of three stations rather than in traditional pairs, mathematically canceling atmospheric disturbances and instrument calibration errors. The team also trained its AI model on images unrelated to astronomy to prevent the algorithm from “assuming” what a black hole should look like.
The researchers fed publicly available EHT observations from 2017, 2018 and 2021 into the new algorithm. The results showed that, across different fields of view and years of data, M87* consistently appeared as a compact ring structure with a diameter of about 42.2 microarcseconds, corresponding to a black hole mass of about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. This closely agrees with previous stellar-dynamics measurements and EHT results.
The study did not “photograph” the black hole again; it conducted a rigorous, independent cross-check of the original data. It indicates that the “doughnut” is a real astrophysical structure formed by gravitationally lensed, redshifted radiation around the black hole, rather than a product of data processing. This also lends further support to general relativity’s prediction of black hole shadows.
IT Home provides the reference link below.
Independent interferometric observable confirms black hole shadow in M87*
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