The Event Horizon Telescope’s 2019 image of M87’s black hole, that orange ring, came from data collected at eight telescopes spread around the planet. There was always a small chance the reconstruction itself had produced the ring. This week a team of four Australian researchers confirmed it holds up, The Register reports.
Samuel Lai of CSIRO and his team built an independent imaging algorithm using machine learning. It works on “closed triplets,” groups of three telescopes that cancel out errors, instead of on station pairs, and they ran it on the same base data. They got the ring again.
My take
This is science working the way it’s supposed to: somebody checks the work with a different method and gets the same answer. I also never get tired of the idea that we can see the shadow of something 55 million light-years away. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
