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The famous first photo of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may not be accurate, a new study has claimed.
The photo, first released in 2022 after years of intense research by an international team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, was a surprising insight into the swirling mass at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
This image famously featured a round orange donut-shaped ring and a dark hole in the center. The dark region in the center is the black hole itself, and the orange color indicates gas heated to high temperatures by the strong surrounding gravity.
But new research suggests that shape is wrong. In fact, a new study led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan suggests that the disk of material accreted around a black hole may be much longer.
This study involves a significant amount of research to collect and verify the data used to create the original images.
However, researchers say the data may have been incorrectly analyzed due to a process error. They made this claim after examining data originally collected in 2017 that was used to create the images.
Makoto Miyoshi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan said, “The image is a little long from east to west, and the eastern half is brighter than the western half.”
“We think this appearance means that the accretion disk surrounding the black hole is rotating at about 60 percent of the speed of light.
“So why did the ring-like image appear? Well, no telescope can capture a perfect image of a celestial body.
“We hypothesize that the ring image resulted from an error during EHT’s image analysis, and that some of it is an artifact rather than an actual astronomical structure.”
A paper explaining the claim, “Independent hybrid imaging of Sgr A* from EHT 2017 observational data,” has been published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.
