When the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team released their first image of a black hole in 2019, the astrophysics community was abuzz: the image of black hole M87 showed a perfect ring structure, just as predicted by the theory of general relativity. As other teams reanalysed the data in the following years, though, scepticism about the image began to slip in. A new, completely independent analysis has now finally banished that scepticism.

The now-iconic doughnut shape of the EHT image is caused by a key property of general relativity, the way that light bends in the presence of an extremely massive object. Observing it for real was one of the strongest pieces of evidence that general relativity is accurate.