Research says the famous image of a black hole in our galaxy may not be accurate

The famous first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy may not be accurate, a new study claims.

The image – first published in 2022, after years of intense work by an international team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration – was a stunning look at the swirling mass that lies at the heart of the Milky Way.

The famous photo showed a donut-shaped ring with a circular orange shape and a dark hole in the middle. The dark area in the center is the black hole itself, and the orange color shows gas that has been heated to extreme temperatures due to the strong gravitational forces surrounding it.

But a new study suggests that the figure is wrong. In fact, the disk of accreting material around the black hole may be longer, according to new research from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

The study goes against vast amounts of research to collect and then verify the data used to create the original image.

However, researchers say errors in the process may have led to the data being incorrectly analyzed. They made this claim after looking at the data, originally collected in 2017, that was used to create the image.

“Our image is slightly stretched in the east-west direction, and the eastern half is brighter than the western half,” said NAOJ's Miyoshi Makoto.

“We think this appearance means that the accretion disk surrounding the black hole is rotating at approximately 60% of the speed of light.

“So why did the ring-like image appear? Well, no telescope can capture an astronomical image perfectly.

“We assume that the annular image resulted from errors during the EHT's imaging analysis and that this part of it was an artifact, not the actual astronomical structure.”

A paper describing the claims, “Independent hybrid imaging of Sagittarius A* from data in EHT 2017 observations,” is Published in the magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.