In a vivid confirmation of theoretical prediction, scientists have discerned a sharp ring of light created by photons whipping around the back of a supermassive black hole. When astronomers revealed humanity’s historic first image of a black hole in 2019 – depicting a dark core encircled by a fiery
. Supermassive black holes occupy the center of most galaxies, packing an extraordinary amount of mass and energy into a small space. The M87 black hole, for example, is two quadrillion times more massive than Earth.
Although the M87 image scientists unveiled in 2019 was a landmark, the scientists thought they could sharpen the image and glean new insights by working smarter, not harder. They applied new software techniques to reconstruct the original 2017 data in search of phenomena that theories and models predicted were lurking beneath the surface. The new, resulting image depicts the photon ring, comprised of a series of increasingly sharp sub-rings, which the team then stacked to get the full image.
“The approach we took involved leveraging our theoretical understanding of how these black holes look to build a customized model for the EHT data,” said Dominic Pesce, a team member based at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “This model decomposes the reconstructed image into the two pieces that we care most about, so we can study both pieces individually rather than blended together.
The result was possible because the EHT is a “computational instrument at its heart,” said Broderick, who holds the Delaney Family John Archibald Wheeler Chair at Perimeter. “It is as dependent on algorithms as it is upon steel. Cutting-edge algorithmic developments have allowed us to probe key features of the image while rendering the remainder in the EHT’s native resolution.”
Reference: “The Photon Ring in M87*” by Avery E. Broderick, Dominic W. Pesce, Roman Gold, Paul Tiede, Hung-Yi Pu, Richard Anantua, Silke Britzen, Chiara Ceccobello, Koushik Chatterjee, Yongjun Chen, Nicholas S. Conroy, Geoffrey B. Crew, Alejandro Cruz-Osorio, Yuzhu Cui, Sheperd S. Doeleman, Razieh Emami, Joseph Farah, Christian M. Fromm, Peter Galison, Boris Georgiev, Luis C. Ho, David J. James, Britton Jeter, Alejandra Jimenez-Rosales, Jun Yi Koay, Carsten Kramer, Thomas P.
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