The jet and resolved features of the central supermassive black hole of M 87 observed with EHT

TL;DR

This paper presents an independent analysis of EHT data of M 87, revealing that the observed ring structures and jet features are artifacts caused by data sampling biases and narrow field of view, challenging prior interpretations.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that the EHT's ring and jet features can be artifacts, emphasizing the importance of data sampling and field of view considerations in image reconstruction.

Findings

The observed ring structures can be simulated from point sources.

The jet structure extends from the core to a few milliarcseconds.

Artifacts are caused by narrow FOV and u-v coverage biases.

Abstract

We report our independent image reconstruction of the M 87 from the public data of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaborators (EHTC). Our result is different from the image published by the EHTC. Our analysis shows that (a) the structure at 230 GHz is consistent with those of lower frequency VLBI observations, (b) the jet structure is evident at 230 GHz extending from the core to a few mas, though the intensity rapidly decreases along the axis, and (c) the unresolved core is resolved into bright three features presumably showing an initial jet with a wide opening angle of about 70 deg. The ring-like structures of the EHTC can be created not only from the public data, but also from the simulated data of a point image. Also, the rings are very sensitive to the FOV size. The u-v coverage of EHT lack about 40 micro-asec fringe spacings. Combining with a very narrow FOV, it created the 40 micro-asec ring structure. We conclude that the absence of the jet and the presence of the ring in the EHTC result are both artifacts owing to the narrow FOV setting and the u-v data sampling bias effect of the EHT array. Because the EHTC's simulations only take into account the reproduction of the input image models, and not those of the input noise models, their optimal parameters can enhance the effects of sampling bias and produce artifacts such as the 40 micro-asec ring structure, rather than reproducing the correct image.