Simulation meets observation in first image of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center

Based on years of observations from around the globe, a huge team at over a hundred institutions managed to assemble an image of the black hole around which our galaxy rotates, despite its relative closeness and the interference from light-years worth of dust, nebulae, and other vagaries of the void.But this wasn’t just a matter of pointing the telescope in the right direction at the right time. This in turn enables evaluation of the design choices and imaging algorithms’ performance.In other words, they generated oceans of data relating to different possible explanations for their observations, and looked at how predictive these simulated black hole environments were.Lisa Medeiros from the Institute for Advanced Study, in a very interesting Q&A worth watching in its entirety if you have the time, explained a bit of this in regards to how and why the study looked at the spin of the black hole and how that related to the spin of materials around it, and to the galaxy at large.“What was really exciting about this new result, compared to what we did in 2019 for M87, was in paper 5 we actually include several simulations where we explore that [i.e. the spin relationships],” she said.