This spring, astronomers revealed the first image ever taken of a black hole, bringing a decades-long effort to a dramatic conclusion. The image offers humanity its first glimpse of the gas and debris that swirl around the object’s event horizon, the point beyond which material disappears forever. A staple of science fiction has finally become visibly real.
“We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) founding director Shep Doeleman when he announced the finding in April. The team of scientists made their announcement simultaneously in seven different countries, accompanied by a series of scientific papers published at the same time in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The subject of the photo session was a nearby galaxy, dubbed M87, and its supermassive black hole, which packs the mass of 6.5 billion suns. Despite its size, the black hole is so far from Earth — 55 million light-years — that capturing the image required a telescope the size of our planet. The EHT fit the bill, with its network of nearly a dozen independent observatories across the globe, cooperating as one enormous detector. (Just eight observatories were part of the EHT in 2017, when researchers first gathered the image data.) The scientists then spent two years analyzing and formatting it before they could unveil the finished picture.
