Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video] (opens in new tab)

Smart move by Veritasium, making a video commenting the news just before the news actually happens. Time works in weird ways around black holes.

Anyways, it is a good one. So is that channel in general.

It is also a good video if you just watched Interstellar, because it also explains why the black hole looks the way it does in the movie. Note that the movie black hole rendering is slightly incorrect for artistic reasons, the video shows the more scientifically accurate version.

Wow, the video you posted is even more informative and clear than the actual press conference, and it was created by someone who hadn't even seen the image yet based purely on the mathematical predictions of what we would see.

Kind of sad that after all the amazing effort and resources that have gone into the creating the image that the international team couldn't have featured an explanation as clear as this in their actual press conference.

Here's the follow up video after the image was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GVbuddri8

So amazing that scientists were able to predict what something would look like that we have never seen before.

The Event Horizon Telescope site has had predicted images up for ages https://eventhorizontelescope.org/science

Side observation: This video, and the video you linked to got two million views in just a few hours. I didn't know black holes where this popular. (market opportunity here)

If one needs an intro, this video should be watched before watching the press release..

In the video he talks about the Schwarzchild radius but doesn't go into details. It is the distance from the center of the black hole to the event horizon.

Anything which is not in that radius or not already in a path towards it should be safe from not getting sucked by the black hole.

E.g. If our sun becomes a black hole, Schwarzchild radius would be 2.954Km i.e. anything outside ~3Km would be safe.

This was explained in the scishow video on that topic[1].

[1]:https://youtu.be/Mm_ks1ce3C4

If the general theory of relatively was tested again and it proved to provide the next result, what does it say about actually is an black hole?

Thus far, from all the experiment and result observed, the theory has been proven to be correct.

Hence, it can be said with 99% certainty whatever it predicts must be correct. I hope it does mention about possibility of creating a worm hole.

A very good (technical) talk about the EHT project and the physics they try to do here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiS1OJNBrvk

It is a bit old (2012), but comprehensive and with both good audio and readable* slides.

*: In the sense that you can see the letters on them

Another link describing what a black hole is:

Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJYo6LKzgA

Part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlry6LqWwJ0

Peace

I just stumbled upon Veritasium a week ago while learning about the double slit experiment in quantum theory and trying to see some actual evidence [1] of the experiment.

[1]: https://youtu.be/Iuv6hY6zsd0

Not sure if I missed it, but can we tell which way the accretion disk is from our view of it?

That was a great video, never grasped why interstellar and such showed black holes with the rings on top and bottom.

So is that hazy diagonal line in the image the accretion disc, viewed edge-on from the Earth?

Ok, wait a second. I liked a lot of this video, but there are some aspects which are kind of ridiculous. He says his reason for his confidence in this prediction is "I think it's going to look like a fuzzy coffee mug stain." He doesn't give an actual reason.

He does talk a lot about theory, a lot of it interesting and novel to me, but by the end of the video, most of this theory suggests a different-looking image!

It doesn't seem to be that accurate, as expectation was for it to have smoother photo sphere, but it has irregular bulges (5 of them). I think they discussed it briefly in the press conference as well. It would be interesting to see if this would change understanding of general relativity and may be give a hint for a theory of quantum gravity.

> Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does

This is of course a bummer, since this means that the acquired image does not give us any new clues of where our understanding of physics is wrong.

Does that image have a weird pulsing optical illusion for anyone else?

And a really great explanation of why it looks the way it does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo

editing that image reveals all kinds of details: https://imgur.com/a/TvQsgbA (and I don't even know what I'm doing)

The article linking to that image: https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298276

The additional pixel density probably doesn't add any details though. The original image looks like a smoothed-out version of a low-res image anyway...

Is this link down for anyone else?

So how much this picture cost ?

the original tiff is 7416x4320

it's still too many pixel, it can be a fifth of that while conveying the same amount of information.

I'm puzzled by this, if each of those pixel is actually captured by the lenses, why is it all this much uniform? was it smoothed or does this suggest that it's actually a gigantic uniform cloud of gas?

haven't seen the whole video of the release, I'll have to catch up later in the evening, but this really seems to have captured way too much compared to the actual lens resolution and I wonder what would be the "confidence interval" or astrophysical equivalent on each of those pixels.

Note that the prediction of the light being brighter on one side did come out.

Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...

> Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

In this video he makes a comment which I struggle to fully understand:

He says that ALL of the matter which belonged to the cooled-off star is DESTROYED in the process of creating a black hole.

That concept of complete destruction eludes me. I assume what he means is, the matter was converted entirely to energy. Right?

But if that's true - where is all of that energy? Is it stored (somehow?) in the Black Hole? Is it dispersed throughout the galaxy? What HAPPENED to the mass (energy)?

If I understand it, this class of “telescope” is made up of arrays of telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.

As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on those too but if that involves a lot of satellites in a heliocentric orbit that may limit contributions considerably.

So true, I was also recently thinking I should read more science/engineering news because that's actually positive stuff happening.

From reddit:

>"Hi, regarding the image itself: What I don't understand is why does it look like a donut and not a bright sphere? Assuming the black hole is actually spherical and not disc shaped, I would expect the Halo to be spherical and surrounding the black hole? so all we would see would be the ball of bright gas, even though there is a black hole in the middle?"

This is also what I would have expected.

(I haven't watched the video, but I do have professional expertise on this topic.)

With interferometry, you're getting an incomplete sampling of the Fourier transform of the sky image, and if you just invert the samples, you get what we call a "dirty" image.

But you know your sampling of the Fourier plane exactly, since that's just a function of the projected baselines between every pair of telescopes during the observation, so you can create a "dirty beam" - now all you have to do is remove the effects of the dirty beam from the dirty image. Of course, that's a deconvolution problem, and given that you don't have all the information - you sampled it - it can never be exact.

But it can be very good! There are very sophisticated radio synthesis image deconvolution algorithms, including CLEAN and Maximum Entropy. For Maximum Entropy methods, you can apply a Bayesian prior on your images - most of the time, the prior we apply is a blank sky (seriously!) but if we have other constraints that we can use (e.g., the approximate size of the region with extended emission), Bayes tells us that we would be remiss not to use it.

If you look at this image [1] from Paper IV [2], we show the image results from different techniques on different observing days. Those are the inputs to what is the "consensus image" - you can check how close they all are to each other.

Does that make sense...?

[1] https://iopscience-event-horizon.s3.amazonaws.com/2041-8205/... [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0e85

Yes, at ~6:53 in the video she shows how they are selecting images to include that look like a black hole. If you plug in enough noisy images you will eventually get a few that look like a bright donut.

Was just wondering this myself. How opinionated is this photo?

Yeah, no kidding. The presentation in the American conference is much more insightful and gives a stronger perspective. And the EU conference didn't even show the image until 8 minutes in.

I really really liked this press conference, I highly recommend it, well worth the watch. It's fairly short (~30m for the main part) and they explain the process step by step: how it was captured -> how it was processed -> what it means.

It's very well communicated in a way most can understand, it's concise and it has great accompanying graphics.

Yeah, apparently radio interferometry is still very manual and so involves many relatively subjective decisions to produce an image.

That's probably why they had several analysers that they then combined into progressively larger teams until they could produce this Consensus-A picture.

As far as I know K. Bouman [0] was the scientist leading the charge on the image processing/reconstruction. A few of her later papers probably have hints [1, 2] about how this is done, but I haven't seen the official release.

[0] http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08832.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07361.pdf

Indeed, from what I gather from this thread and external links this “image” seems to be more of a plot than an image. In fact, are we looking at a matplotlib plot of the data with a “hot” colormap? The iopscience paper even references matplotlib. I’m just making some educated guesses here, but it’s still fun to think about. BTW: Python for the win! iopscience paper makes several references to Python tools (e.g., numpy, Jupyter etc.)

Summary of their summary:

“arising from the rapid atmospheric phase fluctuations, wide recording bandwidth, and highly heterogeneous array”

(Filtering out bad data)

Yes, we're using a telescope the size of the Earth to look at an object the size of our solar system in a galaxy about 55 million light years away. It's an infinitesimally small patch of sky.

On the other hand, the jet from the M87 black hole is quite large and we have good images of it. It's even resolvable by amateurs, I hope to take a picture of it over Easter with a small telescope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Jet

It is a letdown. Although I wasn't expecting Jupiter level detail this pic doesn't blow me away because it's just a blurry ring. Jupiter level detail will blow me away.

Because that collection of pixels is really out there

I mean, in the end, everything that you're looking at is just a collection of cones and rods in your retina. It's the information that it conveys that really matters.

Too bad they don't present it well. I just see self congratulating politicians and officials on some youtube stream.

Telling that it's a US organization that hosts the actual picture.

esa.int and eso.org seem to be down actually.

Why is the European Commission doing this? When I recognized Carlos Moedas I immediately skipped to what mattered. The reason why he was ever appointed as Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation is, to me, more remote than the black hole about which he knows absolutely nothing.

Well this was mostly a US-run effort. It's headed by Harvard University and the key South Pole Telescope is North American.

A black hole itself (the singularity) is 1 dimensional - a single infinitesimal point. The event horizon around it is roughly a sphere. The diagrams that you are talking about are a visual metaphor that represent 3D space as a 2D plane and the 3rd dimension standing in for the influence of gravity. IRL, spacetime has 3 spatial dimensions, not 2, and gravity is not a dimension but a force. It's hard to visually represent gravitational distortion of 3 dimensional space without a 4th spatial dimension to do it with, so textbook diagrams use a 2D plane.

1. Yes, but it's also up for debate, since it's also known that the information content of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, so 2D.

2. The event horizon is spherical. Mathematically we treat it as a point. Nobody knows.

3. It's a gravity well, so everything falls towards it like it does towards the earth. Since it's the center of a galaxy, and galaxies form a 2D spin plane, most matter will be circling it, like our solar system circling the sun, so most matter will come from that planar distribution.

We will never see anything fall into a black hole, as in our space-time, this would happen at infinite time. As things get closer, they red shift from our frame of reference due to time dilation, until the light frequencies are so low that we can no longer detect them

Is an image of a sphere printed on paper three dimensional? Think about that for a moment, and you'll see the problem.

I am not a physicist, but from my lay understanding, a black hole (and all other forms of matter) exists in a four-dimensional space-time form that we can experience directly, plus a number of higher dimensions that we can only extrapolate, and observe indirectly via experiment (kind of how a picture of a sphere is not a sphere due to a missing dimension, but you can still tell it's a sphere based on other characteristics). The exact number of higher dimensions is the realm of string theory, and could be 10, 11, 26, or something else.

The singularity of the black hole is one-dimensional, I think (I could be wrong, I'm often wrong). The event horizon is... funny. The outside of the event horizon is in four-dimensional space-time and is more or less "spherical". The inside is a land of theory and debate, because by definition we can't directly observe it from our space-time. Do space and time even exist inside the event horizon? I dunno, ask someone who knows what they're talking about. The best I can do is an analogy. Imagine it's the surface of the ocean. Above the surface, you're in air. Below the surface, you're in water.

The stretchy sheet of space time illustration is just a simplified visualization space is 3 dimensional so the warping is 3D. The stretchy sheet visual is used a lot because showing a warped 3D grid to be more accurate is a lot harder and a lot less clear and illustrative. Trying to show a 3D grid doesn't even fully capture the situation because it doesn't show how the passage of time gets distorted as well.

Let's start a movement similar to flat Earth, but instead it's Spherical Black Hole. I refuse to believe that a black hole is anything but a sphere no matter what evidence I'm shown.

1. Yes 2. Basically 3. No 4. No

The limit in some sense is the size of the Earth. This picture is from an interferometer observing at very high radio frequencies (wavelength of 1.3 mm) using telescope around the Earth. To improve resolution you would either have to go to even higher frequencies (we have a very hard time doing interferometry there) or find baselines larger than what fits on Earth. And you don't just need a long baseline, but need to keep the baseline constant to within a fraction of the wavelength. So if you want to use satellites to get longer baselines you would have to know their orbit to within a tenth of a millimeter.

As an aside: that image is basically black and white. The intensity is just mapped to black -> orange -> white instead of black -> gray -> white.

One thing missing from @petschge's reply: adding more telescopes! This will not improve the imaging the smallest possible features, but will make features larger (disk and / or jet components) more prominent. The more telescope pairs with different distance between them are added, the more complete the picture will get - up to a limit of having a single antenna roughly the size of Earth.

Furthermore, adding more telescopes will help better image the fainter features in the image (due to larger total collecting surface).

These obs are in radio. We could replace your eyes with radio eyes... ..but it's friction heating so it ought to be broadly blackbody, so I would say yes.

This image is a representation of radio observations. What we would see in the visible part of the spectrum would be different but the structure would likely be similar.

You'd probably be dead from the radiation (that light peaks in the x-ray wavelengths) long before any of the spatial distortion effects got to you.

regular orbits around black holes are possible. Depending on activity if it's far enough away the radiation should be survivable, it just depends on how much matter it's eating up and whether the orbit is planar enough to its spin (otherwise its jets can be deadly).

Pedantic/fun comment: I will assume that one of the presenters said that (I will watch the full video later tonight). One would imagine that that person knows that you cannot see a mustard seed from Brussels because the planet's crust is blocking your line of sight ;) unless the scientist who said that is a flat-earth-believer!

A statement like "it is like viewing a mustard seed X kilometres/miles away would be more appropriate.

And in all seriousness, I have started watching again everything-Star-Trek again (for the 5th time in my life), and news like that make me look up to the sky and think that as a species we do have a chance to move out of here and to a better future.

It doesn't look anything like Gargantua in Interstellar, but it's not really supposed to, except for the most prominent features. Interstellar showed what a black hole might look like in visible light while in orbit around it. This is a radio telescope image from a far away galaxy.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. If anybody else is interested in reading more, the book "The Science of Interstellar" is fascinating and very easily digestible even if you're not big on physics.

just had my wife watch it and yea, that was the first thing I noticed, they really did a good job on the science of interstellar.

When interstellar came out wired did a full magazine spread on the movie, covering its science, how they came up with the story and what the director did to make sure it was believable. idk what it looks like online but I've kept the magazine.

As I understand it, by being more massive this black hole has roughly the same angular size in the sky as Sag A* at the center of our galaxy, but none of the dusty foreground in the way so we get a clearer vantage point.

They did. M87* was the widely publicised "first" photo, but they also got images of Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy).

The difficulties with Sgr A* are twofold:

- The black hole moves too much during an observation (because it's much closer, and parallax is a thing)

- Sgr A* is much smaller than M87* by mass, so even though it's much closer, the angular diameter is almost the same, and the accretion disk is dimmer.

The black hole itself is spherical, but the light we're seeing around it isn't projected by the event horizon; rather, it's light from behind/around the black hole that isn't blocked. This video explains in much more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo

I think the 'glow' around the black hole you are thinking about is a light that was bent by gravity but hasn't gotten to event horizon.

It almost looks like a sun eclipse.

> Are there any plans for a space based VLBI; not easy when you consider the utterly huge amounts of information they have to transfer, a radio telescope in a L5 would be a start.

There is space-based VLBI at lower radio frequencies, with the "Radio Astron" project[0]. That effort works at frequencies which are roughly a factor of ~10 lower than that of the EHT. I'm not aware of any plans for millimeter Space VLBI, but the higher frequency would require higher data rates.

[0] http://www.asc.rssi.ru/radioastron/

Space VLBI is a thing already! Seems to have been around for a while [0][1]. I imagine that the challenge with during EHT-style VLBI in space is downlink bandwidth... there's just no way to get the petabytes of data they talk about down from a satellite. It's already so much data that it's easier to fly hard drives around the world than to send it over the internet, so the transfer would probably take ages over a microwave link. Maybe with laser communication in the near future but even then... it's a lot of data.

Resolution-wise, the angular resolution is inversely proportional to the farthest baseline, as given by the Rayleigh criterion. [2] To get twice the resolution, you "just" need to double the size of your baseline (and do that in both dimensions, otherwise the angular resolution will be different in x & y). We've maxed out the Earth's baseline, so it seems like orbital radio telescopes are the only way to better resolution. Pretty exciting!

[0] - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/space-very-long-baseline-i...

[1] - https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/07/25/thi...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution

>> Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.

One of the reasons they've imaged M87* rather than a black hole in our own galaxy was to avoid dealing with ISM scattering - we don't have to look through our edge-on disk, so it's easier to image another galaxy's center somehow. But the Sgr A* image might be in the works already, it was mentioned in both the press-conference and one of the paper's future work section.

You can ask them directly: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbknik/askscien...

Event horizon telescope has been taking data of the Sag A* black hole but the data is still being processed and yet to be released.

Is this due to occlusion?

And the image itself:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3y037OW0AQmpAf.jpg

Their website talks about some of the challenges of getting a picture of a black hole: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/home

All of the data used to generate the image was gathered by around a dozen different telescopes around the world. The black hole itself also needs to be in a specific configuration in order for us to be able to see it. It needs to have an accretion disk that's generating light. It needs to be sufficiently large or close. And it can't be obfuscated by other astronomical objects like stars or nebulae. This black hole itself is hugeeeeee and far. It's about the size of our solar system, but it's ~52 million light years away.

Well, we have in the same sense that you take a picture of bacteria every time you take a selfie: there certainly are lots of pictures which contain black holes that are too small to be seen in them.

In line with that analogy, the basic difficulty is simply that they are tremendously small compared to the sizes of galaxies.

Here's an NY Times article about the project:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/magazine/how-do-you-take-...

The author, Seth Fletcher, also wrote a book about it, "Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable", if you want more details.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36300597-einstein-s-shad...

There have been plenty of indirect observations such as their jets, stars in very tight orbits around Sagittarius A*, xray binaries etc.

This is a direct observation of the immediate environment of a black hole, i.e. its accretion disk and other light bent around it.

This is as far as I understand the first picture of a black hole shadow, that is the dark disc that indicates that there is actually light missing. Before that, there were astrophysical observations that strongly indicated that there is a black hole, for example QSOs, that is a bright combination of accretion disc and jet, that is powered by a black hole, or one paper I really liked tried to argue that there has to be a black hole in Cygni X1 because otherwise we would see the missing matter crashing into something. (Cygni X1 is a binary of a star and something very bright and the star is loosing mass.)

Because they're very small, very dark, and very distant, compared to visible objects like planets in our solar system, stars in our galaxy, and other galaxies.

Yes. But since you have a bright spot in the center of the larger image and you only have a limited number of baseline between pairs of telescopes there will be all kinds of artefacts in the outer portion of that large image. So it get's cropped away. (Most of it is actually never even computed).

Here's the image via a URL:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3yzi3dX4AEnoEp.png

> Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

Saturns ring, the flattening of the accretion disk, the fact that planet systems will have most planets more or less in one plane and that spiral galaxies are flat (much thinner than they are wide at least) all have the same reason, yes. Basically most orbits align due to initial orbital momentum and the stuff that orbits in other directions sooner or later experiences enough friction to be forced into the common orbital plane.

Conservation of Angular momentum collapses shapely sort of things into a disk

Misspeak? This video says it's 4 million times as massive as the sun, but today's press release and Wikipedia article about it both say it's 6.5 billion times as massive.

Don't it's no fun you'll get space sickness trust me.

It's been done since the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

There are some proposals to do it in space.

https://www.universetoday.com/139566/instead-of-building-sin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...

In the discussions they said that it appeared entirely consistent with GR. Presumably more specific analysis is in papers coming afterwards.

USA Today is live streaming a presentation about this from the National Science Foundation and they seem to be taking the point of view that Einstein's theory of general relativity has held up SO FAR. There is still quite a bit of research to do on the image / data which means the theory could be further proven or disproven.

General relativity predicted the event horizon, but it breaks down when trying to predict what is going on in the center, as all equations go to infinity, which is likely to be more a problem with our current understanding than what is actually happening.

Pretty much exactly what was predicted as to the livestream :-)

Have a look at the papers listed at the bottom of https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E... .

Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they have used CASA and AIPS, two standard software tools that have been developed over more than a decade. Details are consequently scattered over many papers. Radio interferometry is not new and there is entire textbooks on the subject. The exiting bit here is not that we go a first image from interferometry but that we have a first image of the region just around a black hole.

5 PB. The American unveiling focus on just what you talk about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DxjuE7WDlk

There are 6. It's an international accomplishment.

This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk).

http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imagin...

Even that page is not opening for me ...

You are wrong, this is definitely a photo, shot by multiple telescopes global-wise.

Yeah. There were a few NASA projects attempting to do this that got cancelled circa 2010 (programs called TPF-I and SIM).

Something that has been done for a while is using a single telescope in space in conjunction with some on Earth. Russia has a radio telescope in orbit called Spektr-R. I think it died recently, but Spektr-R did interferometry with other telescopes on Earth. When it was operational, I believe it was the widest VLBI array— its orbit was higher than GEO (and even intersected the moon's!), so it got pretty good distance from the ground.

Potentially none. They can just deny its existence and pretend this is a fabrication.

From whatever videos I have watched I don't believe so called "flat earthers" really believe that the earth is flat. At most they seem to be trolls and just like to oppose whatever scientists say. So IMO nobody should waste time explaining anything to them.

? As you can obviously see in the image, the black hole is also flat.

That its a black circle?

Photoshop!

There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.

It's a photo of the absence of light (in the middle) and light/particles swirling around the black hole that haven't passed the event horizon (yet).

Same way we can take a picture of a shadow - by taking a picture of the stuff surrounding it. This black hole is surrounded by a bright accretion disk.

The black hole is warping spacetime around it in a severe fashion. The innermost (unstable) orbit is called the photon sphere, and light can make several orbits around the hole before either falling in, or going off to infinity. The result is that (depending on the hole’s rotation relative to your point of view) you’re going to see roughly the same image we have today. You’re actually going to see multiple images of the entire hole, stretched around the outer edge, and those images multiplied and distorted again. If you could somehow “stand” by the photon spehere you’d see the back of your own head many many times.

The other factor is that while the event horizon itself is a spheroid, the accretion disk of bright infalling material is not. The horizon is totally black, so it will always look roughly like seeing a disk face-on no matter where you look at it. The accretion disk is a “hoop” that’s stretched and the image is multiplied and distorted by the strong warping of spacetime in the region. As a result you get smeared and repeated views of the entire disk including portion behind the hole in a kind of bent band. Plus the whole thing is subject to strong Doppler beaming hence the bright and dark regions.

Neither. Hawking radiation - if it exists – is far too weak to be detected this way.

The Hawking radiation for a black hole with this mass would be really small. It actually decreases with added mass. So, this observation does not say anything about Hawking radiation.