Physicists disagree on a claim of detecting a black hole’s ‘photon ring’

• Physicists disagree on whether or not the treasure found in the first image of a black hole has been uncovered.
• According to a team of researchers, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 has a thin halo of light surrounding it called a photon ring.
• The photon ring would provide a new way to measure the powerful gravity of the black hole if it were real.
• However, other scientists doubt the assumption.
• A key concern is that the photon ring, which emits around 60% of the light in the image, is brighter than anticipated.

“That’s a giant red flag,” says physicist Alex Lupsasca of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

More light should come from the black hole’s main glowing doughnut than from the thin photon ring.

According to Marrone, the new result does not show whether that form is linked to the photon ring; rather, it just suggests that an additional thin ring improves data matching. Thus, it begs the question of whether astronomers are indeed identifying a photon ring or are only picking out an unrelated structure in the picture.

However, Broderick argues that the ring’s features, such as the fact that its size and placement are consistent day in and day out, support the photon ring explanation.

Gralla and physicist Will Lockhart, both from the University of Arizona, write in an article submitted to arXiv.org on August 22 that they did not discover any proof of a photon ring in a separate, independent investigation.

Some researchers suggest adding space-based telescopes to the EHT’s crew of observatories in order to clearly detect the photon ring. The network’s telescopes may be able to distinguish finer features, possibly even the photon ring, the further apart they are from one another.

Also Read: Scientists find dormant black hole born without explosion of a dying star

Now, this dispute over the image of M87 black hole is causing ruckus among scientists in the astrophysics community, who are already worried about the value of this “find.” read more here