An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the results of the first observations ever obtained of the ring structure showing matter falling into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. A team of researchers used the ALMA and GLT radio telescopes and some of the ones part of the GMVA array to obtain the images they were looking for. These images show not only the area around the black hole but also the flows of materials that originate a relativistic jet. The collected data is useful to understand the mechanisms that lead those jets to reach the energies necessary to be accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light.

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the results of using a machine learning system to obtain a sharper and more detailed version of the image showing the area around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. Lia Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), Dimitrios Psaltis (Georgia Tech), Tod Lauer (NOIRLab), and Feryal Özel (Georgia Tech), all members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration that obtained the image that has become famous, developed the PRIMO system to reprocess the data collected during the original observation campaign in 2017. Their aim is to obtain the maximum possible resolution with all the details present in the data collected by the various radio telescopes participating in the EHT Collaboration. The image, to which the four researchers hold the rights, shows the comparison between the famous result published in 2019 and that of the first test with PRIMO.