In April of 2017, all 8 of the telescopes/telescope arrays associated with the Event Horizon Telescope pointed at Messier 87. This is what a supermassive black hole looks like, where the existence of the event horizon is clearly visible. Only through VLBI could we achieve the resolution necessary to construct an image like this, but the potential exists to someday improve it by a factor of hundreds. The shadow is consistent with a rotating (Kerr) black hole. (EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION ET AL.)

The Incredible Science Behind Black Holes, Gravity, And The 2020 Nobel Prize

Congratulations to Penrose, Ghez and Genzel, and to black hole enthusiasts everywhere.

On October 6, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded towards research in black holes. 50% of the prize went to Roger Penrose for theoretical work demonstrating how black holes could physically, realistically form in our Universe, while 50% went jointly to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for the discovery of Sagittarius A*: generally accepted to be a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. These three prize recipients are absolutely deserving for the incredible research work they’ve done, and marks the first Nobel Prize ever for what many scientists consider pure gravitational research.

Albert Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for General Relativity, and he himself thought that black holes were purely mathematical creations, not actual, physical objects. Penrose’s theoretical work was critical in not only rigorously providing a pathway for their formation, but in revolutionizing how physicists think about these spacetimes. Similarly, Ghez and Genzel transformed the field of observational astronomy, particularly of objects near the galactic center, enabling us to learn more about black holes than ever before. Here’s the science…