Black hole picture: Astronomers question if the first picture of a black hole is accurate

The Event Horizon Telescope’s first image of a black hole showed a distinctive ring feature, but a reanalysis of their data has raised concerns over whether that ring of light is real

By Leah Crane

There may be a problem with the first image of a black hole. After three years of analysis, a group of researchers in Japan has produced an image of M87* – the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy – that looks markedly different from the one released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2019. The researchers claim that the EHT group may have made a mistake.

To make the first black hole image, …