Australian team independently confirms historic image of the M87 black hole

A team of four Australian researchers has independently confirmed the ring-shaped image of the black hole M87, first published in 2019. Their result supports the original finding and shows how independent methods can help check scientific work.

Led by CSIRO postdoctoral fellow Samuel Lai, the team used a new machine-learning algorithm on the original Event Horizon Telescope data. It analysed measurements from eight telescopes and used groups of three telescopes to reduce errors, rather than the station pairs used in the original approach. The resulting image was almost identical in size and shape to the historic image, according to a paper published in Nature.