---
title: "Bad News! That Image of a Black Hole Might Be Totally Screwed Up"
description: "Researchers released a new image of M87*, a black hole photographed in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope — and it doesn't match the first one."
date: "2022-05-21"
modified: "2022-05-21"
authors:
  - name: "Lonnie Lee Hood"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/ahood"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/image-black-hole-possibly-incorrect"
categories:
  - "Astrophysics"
  - "Black Holes"
  - "Science & Energy"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "Black holes"
  - "m87*"
  - "space"
  - "the digest"
---

# Bad News! That Image of a Black Hole Might Be Totally Screwed Up

![Researchers released a new image of M87\*, a black hole photographed in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope -- and it doesn't match the first one.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-black-hole-possibly-incorrect.png>)
*\<em\>Image: arXiv / Miyoshi\</em\>*

## Sorta Twinning

A new image of a black hole in the center of a distant galaxy just dropped, but it's making researchers worried that the [first image of the same one](<https://futurism.com/scientists-release-first-image-black-hole>) wasn't quite right.

It took researchers in Japan three years to produce an image of M87\*, the black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. *New Scientist* [reported this week](<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2320810-astronomers-question-if-the-first-picture-of-a-black-hole-is-accurate/>) that the group used the same data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a collection of eight radio telescopes that act as one, to produce a new version of the iconic [black hole image released in 2019](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/black-hole-photo-amazing-zoom-out>).

Like the original team, they used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and compile the vast heap of data into a single image. As with any algorithm, though, that unfortunately means there's room for human error and incorrect assumptions — and that's an issue here, because the new image doesn't look like the one from 2019.

## Hole Story

National Astronomical Observatory of Japan researcher Makato Myoshi and colleagues used a wider field of view to get the new image of M87\*, which cut out the ring of light around the donut-shaped structure that appeared in the 2019 image. That's bad news, because Myoshi thinks the alleged error could affect the way other black hole images turn out — including, provocatively, the new EHT image of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy [released this month](<https://futurism.com/image-black-hole-center-galaxy>).

"It may be that the same mistake formed the ring image in the case of Sagittarius A," Myoshi told *New Scientist*.

All that said, EHT scientists are pushing back against Myoshi's claims, setting up a schism in the nascent field of black hole imagery.

"\[Myoshi's team\] used this extraordinarily large field of view," Geoffrey Bower, an EHT project scientist, told *New Scientist*. "You can get almost anything you want if you give yourself that kind of freedom."

The competing teams may not agree on methodology, but that's how science happens — and the debate's gonna be interesting to watch.

**More on black holes:** [*Hairy Black Holes Key to Solving Paradoxes of the Universe*](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/hairy-black-holes-paradox-universe>)