The Image of the M87 Black Hole Reconstructed with PRIMO - IOPscience

The exceptional resolution achieved by the EHT is made possible by an array of telescopes spanning the Earth and operating as a very long baseline interferometer (VLBI; Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. 2019b, 2019c). Despite this global reach, the sparse interferometric coverage of the EHT array (especially during the 2017 observations that have been used for all of the publications to date) makes the already complex problem of interferometric image reconstruction particularly challenging. In such situations, special care is needed to assess the impact of imaging algorithms and sparse interferometric data on the final set of images that can be reconstructed from it. A cornerstone of the EHT data analysis strategy was the use of several independent analysis methods, each with different priorities, assumptions, and choices, to ensure that the EHT results were robust to these differences. The use of several general-purpose imaging algorithms, for example, was motivated by a desire to reconstruct an image that was consistent with the EHT data while remaining model-agnostic.