How Scientists Saw the ‘Unseeable’ — and Captured the First Image of a Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope peered into the Messier 87 galaxy
By Neel V. Patel
Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced Wednesday that they’ve successfully imaged the event horizon of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, nearly 55 million light-years away from Earth. A fiery maelstrom, the new image comes two years after the team initially captured their data, and ends a long wait for one of the most exciting astrophysical endeavors in modern memory.
“Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe,” Sheperd Doeleman, the director of EHT and a scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the audience at a National Science Foundation press conference in Washington, D.C. “Because they are so small, we’ve never seen one. We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen, and taken an image, of a black hole.”
The gravity exerted by a black hole is so powerful that light cannot even escape it, which obviously makes it nigh impossible to actually take a picture of one. But black holes possess what’s called an event horizon: a boundary designating the point of no return. Light and matter that cross…
