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In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope gave us our. It was a powerful image, but not one with much detail. It looks like a blurry orange donut. To be fair, the real meat of the discovery was in the data, not the image. And as a recent study shows, there’s a great deal more in the data than what we’ve seen.
Light is passing near the black hole in all sorts of directions, but from our perspective, we can only see the light that is focused toward us. Any beam of light that loops around the black hole and heads our way, we should be able to see. It turns out that the black hole can act as a really strong lens. Light can pass extremely close to the black hole, and get focused directly toward us. So what we should see is a thin circle of light known as the photon ring.
So why doesn’t the EHT image show the photon ring? Unfortunately, the space between us and the black hole isn’t completely empty. There is still a surrounding region of cold gas, which the light has to pass through to reach us. Some of the light scatters along the way, making the image more blurry than we’d like. This is where the new study comes in.
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