> With PRIMO, computers analyzed over 30,000 high-fidelity simulated images of black holes accreting gas. That means that the new image better conforms to the simulated data. I understand why it makes sense to do this (simulated data generated following the laws of physics, etc.) but it seems to me that the original point of the EHT was to experimentally verify that black holes actually look as we've modeled them for…
Didn’t the original image also have a lot of designer choices made which, in some sense, contaminate the results?
The original image was an amalgamation of several different reconstruction techniques with varying dependence on prior information. They also had data driven techniques during the original analysis but I don't think they were used to generate the final image shown to the public
Interferometry relies on measuring the interference pattern between two points simultaneously measuring incoming radio waves. Each element of a baseline must be measured at the same time. If we were to allow the Earth to rotate around the Sun and measure components of the same baseline at different times, we would violate this.
what about space telescopes in orbit at earth's radius at various points in the orbit?
I don't know what exactly the tradoffs are, but I suspect this approach has a lower sensitivity due to size of the dishes, it's more difficult to get enough telescopes to form a good image, and transmitting the data back is likely to be a challenge (the black hole observations were shipped on hard drives instead of transmitted via the internet. Even achieving a broadband-speed transmission rate with a deep space object is difficult)
The way I read this: "Our imaging system lacks sufficient resolution to confirm or disprove our theories. But we can achieve better resolution by generating images based on our theories, and combining those generated images with the data from the imaging system. We are astonished to find that the resulting high-resolution images confirm our theories." Isn't this some kind of anti-science?
No, but it is worth being careful about what such fitting means: What it's saying is "given this set of theories about what the black hole might look like, here's what it most likely looks like" (and hence what theory of those in the set is most likely). That's still usefully improving your knowledge, even though in theory there could be some other shape it looks like with theories you have not considered. And stating with the prior it could look like literally anything is not necessarily reasonable: no-one expects that it would look like a tree, for example, and that's because of other things we have observed about the universe. Science, especially astrophysics and cosmology, is a lot like a gigantic crossword: the clues and answers to other parts of the puzzle constrain the other parts, and while it's theoretically possible that there is some completely different model for everything that fits all the observations done so far, generally the bits which are less clearly known still have a pretty well-defined shape, because they are constrained by other information and the models which fit that.