Explainers
A research paper is written for a handful of specialists. These pages are for everyone else. Each one tells the story behind one paper in plain language: the question we asked, how we went about it, and what we found. Most have a short reel to go with them; this is where to come for the details.
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A Black Hole Without a Horizon?Could M87* be a collapsed object with no event horizon? We ran the first 3D magnetised simulation of gas falling onto such an object. Its image looks almost identical to a black hole's, except for a faint glow from inside the shadow that future telescopes could see.
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Reading the Magnetic Fingerprints of M87*The first image of M87* could have been drawn by many different arrangements of gas and magnetic field. By comparing a large family of models with the polarised light, we found that the gas slowly spirals inward and that the field's shape can be read from the image.