Astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project took the first images of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy back in 2019.. But now Japanese scientists who analyzed the images have questioned whether they are correct, according to New Scientist..

A bright spot of light can be seen in the image of the supermassive black hole M87 *. The researchers expressed doubt that this ring is real.. Japanese researchers have created their own image of a black hole, and it is different from the one obtained by the EHT specialists.

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EHT teamed up eight radio telescopes around the world to get the first image of a black hole.. Essentially, the array worked like one giant telescope called an interferometer.. Each pair of telescopes records a specific wavelength of light, and then all the information is combined to create the final image..

These " The most notable feature of the final EHT image is the bright ring, the result of the black hole's extreme gravity bending light from the hot plasma swirling around it.. But filling in the gaps to create an image requires some assumptions.. If the set of assumptions is different, the result will be a different picture..

This is exactly what Makoto Miyoshi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his colleagues did.. The result made them question whether such a ring of light really exists.. The researchers reprocessed the EHT data with one significant difference: instead of limiting the light collected by telescopes to a relatively small area, as the EHT collaboration did, they chose a much larger field of view..

After making these changes, the ring did not appear in the final image.. Instead, the image shows two distinct bright spots: one is the area directly around the black hole, and the other is to the side, possibly representing the base of the jet of matter, which, as shown in previous work, is ejected from M87 *.

Miyoshi speculates that the field-of-view limitation may have resulted in artifacts in the EHT image that are related to the location of telescopes rather than actual structures in space.. “Perhaps the same error formed the image of the ring in the case of the [recently published image] of Sagittarius A*,” says Miyoshi, referring to the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way..

Japanese scientists believe that it is likely that the black hole in both images should not look like a donut.

However, UNT project scientist Gregory Bauer says that the approach to the restrictions imposed on the telescope is wrong.. According to him, the team's initial field of view reflects the area that the telescope actually sees, and is not the result of an arbitrary choice..

“[Team Miyoshi] used this extraordinarily large field of view, so they diffuse the light intensity around this image.. You can get almost anything you want if you give yourself that kind of freedom."

According to him, the UNT collaboration includes four teams that use different approaches for image verification.. One of them is similar to the Miyoshi team's approach, but with a limited field of observation..

Earlier, astronomers using the Very Large Telescope found six galaxies that surround a supermassive black hole. The discovery will allow scientists to understand how supermassive black holes could form and reach colossal sizes in a short time..