First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
By K. Akiyama, A. Alberdi, W. Alef, K. Asada, R. Azulay, A. Baczko, D. Ball, M. Baloković, J. Barrett, D. Bintley and 205 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2019
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We present the first Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) images of M87, using observations from April 2017 at 1.3 mm wavelength. These images show a prominent ring with a diameter of ~40 μas, consistent with the size and shape of the lensed photon orbit encircling the "shadow" of a supermassive black hole. The ring is persistent across four observing nights and shows enhanced brightness in the south. To assess the reliability of these results, we implemented a two-stage imaging procedure. In the first stage, four teams, each blind to the others' work, produced images of M87 using both an established method (CLEAN) and a newer technique (regularized maximum likelihood). This stage allowed us to avoid shared human bias and to assess common features among independent reconstructions. In the second stage, we reconstructed synthetic data from a large survey of imaging parameters and then compared the results with the corresponding ground truth images. This stage allowed us to select parameters objectively to use when reconstructing images of M87. Across all tests in both stages, the ring diameter and asymmetry remained stable, insensitive to the choice of imaging technique. We describe the EHT imaging procedures, the primary image features in M87, and the dependence of these features on imaging assumptions.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba09be9cc3d195b5affd36432590b568f12fdab9
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Citations in the corpus
- Black Hole Parameter Estimation from Its Shadow (2018, methodology): “Further, fitting geometric models to the observational data and extracting feature parameters in the image domain indicates that we see emission from near the event horizon that is gravitationally lensed into a crescent shape around the photon ring (Akiyama et al. 2019c, 2019d).”
- The shape of the black hole photon ring: A precise test of strong-field general relativity (2020, neutral): “[19] Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, K.”
- Lensing by Kerr black holes (2019, neutral): “[4] Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, K.”