Event Horizon Telescope Options

[alan]

On April 10th 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration will present its first results in six simultaneous press conferences around the world, and many satellite events organized by its stakeholder and affiliated institutions. Press conferences will be held simultaneously in Brussels (in English), Santiago (in Spanish), Shanghai (in Mandarin), Tokyo (in Japanese), Taipei (in Mandarin), and Washington D.C. (in English), starting at 13:00 Universal Time.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/medi...nted-april-10th

[dtolman]

The image has been released!


Its remarkably like the artists rendering, especially if you flip it upside down.

EDIT:
Paper has been released here.
It has more data than the simple press release - such as multiple images taken over the course of a week by the EHT. To my eye it seems that the bright feature may be slowly rotating counter-clockwise - hopefully new observation campaigns unveil the dynamics of the black hole!

[fredk]

To my eye it seems that the bright feature may be slowly rotating counter-clockwise - hopefully new observation campaigns unveil the dynamics of the black hole!

I asked a member of the EHT team about this yesterday and he pointed out that, although the resolution is of course quite low, the S/N of these images is actually quite high. So the changes seen over the observation period might be real changes in the source. It sounds like they are working on addressing the question of whether the observed changes are consistent with model predictions of the dynamics.

One of the better fairly-basic-level descriptions of what we're seeing in the case of M87* is this post. The gist is that we are seeing some combination of a "photon ring" and a nearly-face-on acretion disc (the inclination is estimated at less than 20 degrees or so). How much of each is strongly model-dependent, so we can't say yet that this image shows the photon ring. (The team have definitely taken this effect into account.)