Newshot "Donut" Confirmed: Humanity's First Black Hole Photo Passes Re-verification with New Algorithm
IT之家 November 13 news: According to a latest research report published on November 11 in Nature, an Australian research team has confirmed through a new algorithm that the "donut" in M87, the subject of humanity's first black hole photo in 2019, is real.
The supermassive black hole M87* at the center of the M87 galaxy is about 55 million light-years from Earth. The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released it in 2019 as humanity's first black hole photo. In the image, bright matter surrounds a central dark region, resembling a "donut." However, due to sparse radio telescope data and complex calibration, the academic community once questioned whether this ring structure was merely an "artifact" caused by imaging algorithms or instrument errors.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) team developed an independent imaging method called GenDIReCT. Centered on "closure invariants," it processes telescopes in three-station combinations rather than the traditional pairwise pairing, thereby mathematically canceling atmospheric disturbances and instrument calibration errors; meanwhile, the research team trained the AI model on images unrelated to astronomy, avoiding the algorithm "presupposing" what a black hole should look like.
The researchers fed EHT public observation data from 2017, 2018, and 2021 into the new algorithm. The results showed that regardless of different fields of view or data from different years, M87* consistently presented a compact ring structure, with a ring diameter of about 42.2 microarcseconds, corresponding to a black hole mass of about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun, highly consistent with previous stellar dynamics measurements and EHT results.
This study did not re-"photograph" the black hole, but conducted strict, independent cross-validation of the original data. It shows that the "donut" is a real astrophysical structure formed by gravitationally lensed, redshifted radiation around the black hole, not a product of data processing; this further supports general relativity's prediction of the black hole shadow.
- Independent interferometric observable confirms black hole shadow in M87*
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