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The famous first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy may not be accurate, according to a new study.
The image – originally released in 2022, after years of intense work by an international team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration – offered a stunning glimpse of the swirling mass at the heart of the Milky Way.
The image shows a donut-shaped ring with a round orange shape and a dark hole in the middle. The dark region in the center is the black hole itself, and the orange shows gas that has been heated to intense temperatures by the powerful gravitational forces surrounding it.
But a new study suggests the form is wrong. In fact, the disk of accumulated material around the black hole may be longer, according to new research led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
The study flies in the face of much research conducted to gather and then verify the data used to create the original image.
The researchers say, however, that errors in the process could have led to poor data analysis. They made the claim after reviewing the data, originally collected in 2017, that was used to create the image.
“Our image is slightly elongated in the east-west direction, and the eastern half is brighter than the western half,” said Miyoshi Makoto of the NAOJ.
“We think this appearance means that the accretion disk surrounding the black hole is spinning at about 60% the speed of light.
“Why, then, did the ring-shaped image appear? Well, no telescope can capture an astronomical image perfectly.
“We hypothesize that the ring image resulted from errors during the EHT imaging analysis and that part of it was an artifact, rather than an actual astronomical structure .”
A paper describing the claims, “An independent hybrid imaging of Sgr A* from data from 2017 EHT observations,” is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
