The silhouette is about 40 microarcseconds wide, the size of a hydrogen atom seen at arm’s length. The EHT can’t merely take a picture of a black hole. (That’s the image on the left.)Īstronomers have now changed the lenses on the computational glasses they use to reconstruct the image, creating the view on the right. This black hole, the leviathan dwelling in the heart of the elliptical galaxy M87, rocketed to worldwide fame in 2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released their hard-won image of the black hole’s silhouette. But they’re two views of the same black hole. These two images might look like different things: one a fat, blurry orange doughnut, the other the sinuous noose on the end of a lariat. Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), D. Future work could pin down these kinds of structures and use them to learn more about the material accreting onto the black hole. It might be matter swirling around the black hole and falling in. The tail at the bottom might or might not be a real feature, as it changes quite a bit depending on the analysis. The original image from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration of the shadow of the black hole M87* (left), compared with a new version generated by the PRIMO algorithm (right).
