The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) researchers published the first image of a black hole and its shadow in 2019, showing a bright ring with a dark circular area in the centre, the shadow of the black hole.
The new 2018 observations reveal a bright emission ring around the black hole of the same size as in 2017, with the brightest part of the ring shifted by about 30 degrees between observations. Image credit: EHT
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has released new images of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87. Researchers from Aalto University and the University of Turku contributed to forming the images from the new observations.
The groundbreaking image showed that the giant galaxy Messier 87 has a supermassive black hole M87* at its centre. The black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth.
Now, the research team has published a new image of the M87* black hole based on more recent and more precise observations taken in 2018. With the participation of the newly commissioned Greenland Telescope and a dramatically improved recording rate across the array, the 2018 observations give us a view of the source independent from the first observations in 2017.
According to the theory of general relativity, the size of the ring around a black hole depends mainly on the mass of the black hole. Based on this, the researchers assumed that the ring in the new image remains the same.
The new images show the M87* black hole with a bright ring around it, similar to and the same size as the one observed in 2017. This result confirms the research team’s earlier breakthrough.
