A four-person Australian team independently reprocessed the famous black hole image — the ring is still there

The backstory: why the first black hole image has been argued over

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first direct image of a black hole: a bright ring, darker in the middle, around the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. It became one of the most recognizable scientific pictures of the century.

It was not a snapshot from an ordinary camera. No single telescope on Earth is large enough, so scientists linked radio telescopes around the world to mimic a planet-sized dish. The measurements are sparse, and a complex reconstruction is needed to turn them into a picture. That left a lingering worry: could the processing itself have turned something that is not a ring into a ring?

CSIRO astronomer and lead author Samuel Lai has compared the challenge to standing in your backyard and trying to photograph a doughnut on the Moon.

What they did

On November 12, CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility said Lai, Nithyanandan Thyagarajan, Ivy Wong, and Foivos Diakogiannis had developed a new imaging method, GenDIReCT, and applied it to the public 2019 EHT data. The paper appears in Nature.

The method is designed to reduce the effects of instrument calibration errors and subjective processing choices. According to the team, it uses triplets of telescope measurements rather than the usual pairs to cancel those errors, and it does not start with a built-in idea of what a black hole should look like. When they applied it to the M87 data, Lai said, they found a black hole almost identical in size and shape to the historic EHT image.

The paper's abstract gives the numbers: a ring-like structure with an angular diameter of 42.2 ± 1.5 microarcseconds, corresponding, under the usual scaling assumptions, to a black hole mass of 6.5 ± 0.5 billion suns, seen at an inclination of about 20 degrees from the approaching jet. A microarcsecond is an extremely small unit of angle, used for the finest structures on the sky.

Laurent Loinard, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, said the independent method recovered the ring structure of M87* across several years, in excellent agreement with the collaboration's published results. Studies like this, he said, strengthen confidence in what has been learned and add to the community's toolkit.

It will not change everyday photography, but it may travel further

CSIRO also said the technique has the potential to improve medical imaging and the mapping of earthquakes. That is a possible future use, not a product already in clinics or in the field.

What is confirmed now is narrower and still important: an independent method that was not told to expect a black hole still recovered the ring from the public data. This is not a brand-new picture of a never-before-seen object. It is a harder, independent check on a famous one. For everyone who has seen that image, the practical takeaway is simple — the ring looks less and less like something the software invented.

Original source published: Australia Telescope National Facility (CSIRO), Nov 12, 2026, 07:38:16 Beijing time (UTC+8)