The Image of the M87 Black Hole Reconstructed with PRIMO
Abstract
We present a new reconstruction of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) image of the M87 black hole from the 2017 data set. We use PRIMO, a novel dictionary-learning-based algorithm that uses high-fidelity simulations of accreting black holes as a training set. By learning the correlations between the different regions of the space of interferometric data, this approach allows us to recover high-fidelity images even in the presence of sparse coverage and reach the nominal resolution of the EHT array. The black hole image comprises a thin bright ring with a diameter of 41.5 ± 0.6 μas and a fractional width that is at least a factor of 2 smaller than previously reported. This improvement has important implications for measuring the mass of the central black hole in M87 based on the EHT images.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- April 2023
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2304.06079
- Bibcode:
- 2023ApJ...947L...7M
- Keywords:
-
- Black hole physics;
- Black holes;
- Supermassive black holes;
- Long baseline interferometry;
- Principal component analysis;
- 159;
- 162;
- 1663;
- 932;
- 1944;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
- E-Print:
- 7 pages, 5 figures
