The well known pictures of black holes are fake!

[LifeIsStrange]

Almost everyone has heard that the Event Horizon Telescope has imaged two supermassive black holes, including the one at the center of the milky way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#/media/File:Black_hole_-_Messier_87_crop_max_res.jpg

While the pictures are low resolution, they shows:
a light halo, with some zones more bright than others, (the blach hole accretion disc), and most importantly, a clear black circle at their center, that indubitably are what we expect from a black hole, meaning that light cannot excape! which is, while people take it for absolute truth, merely a conjecture based on our mainstream theory of gravity and of the "constancy" of the speed of light.

I have always been very skeptical about those pictures, an opinion shared by almost nobody, probably because of the "I want to believe" effect, of the belief that black holes are proven objects, and because of mainstream science "authority".
I was skeptical because:
This is a radio image, which are particularly bad for morphology analysis
The zone observed (AGN center) is maximally dust obscured and is even polluted in the radio spectrum
but most importantly because this is not an image taken by a telescope, despite what the name implies, but by sparse interferometers.
While interferometers are good for astrometry, they are particularly unfit for imaging, are there any precedent of a decent image made via interferometry synthesis? Even of nearby objects like a nebula? I don't think so. So to apply such an unprecedented methodology on such an ambitious object without proving the method for already well charachterized objects is an obvious hint of scientific fraud that nobody seems to have thought about much.
Another thing that was striking, at the time, was how synthetic the image feels, and how the two black holes seems similar, and how we see zero background objects.
Despite this, I was unsure how they could produce such a perfect blackhole shape, I was suspecting it was their post processing algorithm that constructed the fake black hole shape signal, but a part of me tended to believe it because I thought anyone could inspect their methodology and finds the obvious flaw in it.
The truth is more subtle than that, and has been discovered today, the black holes images are most likely fake and a result of the uncorrected point spread function of their instruments!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17477
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/stae1158/7660988

I am sure we will see the bullshit asymmetry principle in action where this refutation will have very few media coverage.
Their planned next generation successor will make it harder to invent a signal:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11188

When properly processed, the sagittarius picture seems to be:

hybrid mapping reveals an elongated east-west structure, consistent with previous observations. We believe it to be more reliable than the EHTC image
The eastern half is brighter, possibly due to a Doppler boost from the rapid rotating disk.
We hypothesize our image shows a portion of the accretion disk about 2 to a few RS away from the black hole, rotating with nearly
60% f the speed of light viewed from an angle of 40 − 45○.

[Francois-Zinserling]

I don't have a particular objection to the thories of black holes, as there does seem to be a regime at which physics breaks down. So call them what you like but they are going to be weird objects.

One thing I cannot grasp from the images - if we, earth and sol, are in the galactic disk, then the accretion disk must be in our plane. Else what is accreted? Then by extension how can we see the black hole through that?
Yes I know we 'see' the black hole when we don't see anything, but not right through an accretion disk, surely?

[HanDeBruijn]

I have always been very skeptical about those pictures, an opinion shared by almost nobody

Except at least by the author of this comment, as evidenced by the Empty Hole Photo webpage at my Alternative Cosmology site. And, by the way, CopyLefted software is included.
Update There is a somewhat improved version of the accompanying Delphi Pascal code available now, provided with another fuzzyfication method instead of Gaussian Blur.

[LifeIsStrange]

Well played Han, your simulation seems quite impressive and prescient!

[LifeIsStrange]

I have found this previous discussion that is quite related
https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/153

[sferios]

I have always been very skeptical about those pictures, an opinion shared by almost nobody

I never believed those photos, personally.

And aren't galaxy cores actually torus-shaped plasmoids resulting from the z-pinch effect of two paralles Birkeland currents creating a magnetic field. Didn't Alfven, Bostick and Peratt et al demonstrate how these plasmoids attract neutral hydrogen, dust and even grain-size particles?

[RedshiftDrift]

I have always been very skeptical about those pictures, an opinion shared by almost nobody...

Many ACG members rejected the the black hole interpretation of the picture of SgrA* in 2019, on the discussion forum that was on a.cosmology@gaggle... at the time.

From Anton Petrov:
"First Image of Milky Way Black Hole May Be Actually Be Entirely Wrong"
https://youtu.be/cdeee7tZ8QY

[LifeIsStrange]

just learnt that the EH telescope group officially "responded" to one of the papers

https://youtu.be/9U6bvR6SzMo?si=ndULauUkvPn9hj18&t=124

[RedshiftDrift]

As Dr. Smethurst says, the data is analyzed with "AI trained on what black holes might look like", trained on the results of general relativity. It's not surprising then that they get results "consistent with the predictions of general relativity"!

That the "ring" has the size of the point spread function is a very strong argument from the Miyoshi team. It's known in optics that there is no unambiguous way to deconvolve data that has noise and fluctuates in time, so for all we know both claimed "images of a black hole" might be wrong...