Just Released: First Ever Picture of a Black Hole

M87’s supermassive black hole. At 40 billion km across, it is about the size of our entire solar system. Because this black hole is more stable and changes less over the course of an evening, it was easier to capture despite being much farther out than the 25,000 light year away black hole at the center of our own galaxy. Image by the EHT and National Science Foundation.

The above image is as monumental and weighted as its subject: the black hole at the center of a supergiant galaxy. Released early this April morning by the European Southern Observatory, it is our first ever look at a black hole. Transfixing and glorious, beloved and anticipated, the image represents another stepping stone in our understanding of the cosmos. It is a testament to human ingenuity and to the enigmatic and bewitching place that is our universe. The photograph itself was a labor of love by different scientists from across the world, the needed data pouring into radio observatories in the blistering cold of Antartica, the eternal stretching desert plains, and even to the tops of extinct volcanoes on paradisiacal islands amidst the rolling sea. At billions of times the mass of our sun, the image shows a supermassive black hole and a formidable subject. Its picture? Just as tremendous.

The Journey

The Event Horizon telescope actually set out to photograph two black holes — the aforementioned Sagittarius A*, and another black hole at the center of the supergiant Messier 87 galaxy. The two are a beautiful contrast to one another. The black hole at the center of our galaxy is quiet and composed, swallowing only a few stars and harboring a dim accretion disk. The black hole from Messier 87 is much more boisterous than that; it…