The black hole at the center of our Milky Way, simulated here, is the largest one seen from Earth’s perspective. The Event Horizon Telescope should, this year, come out with their first image of what this central black hole’s event horizon looks like. The white circle represents the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. (Ute Kraus, Physics education group Kraus, Universität Hildesheim; background: Axel Mellinger)

This Is Why The Event Horizon Telescope Still Doesn’t Have An Image Of A Black Hole

The data has been taken, collected, and analyzed. So where is the first image of an event horizon, already?

Across multiple continents, including Antarctica, an array of radio telescopes observe the galactic center.

A view of the different telescopes contributing to the Event Horizon Telescope’s imaging capabilities from one of Earth’s hemispheres. The data taken from 2011 to 2017 should enable us to now construct an image of Sagittarius A*. (APEX, IRAM, G. Narayanan, J. McMahon, JCMT/JAC, S. Hostler, D. Harvey, ESO/C. Malin)

This network, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is imaging, for the first time, a black hole’s event horizon.

The most-visualized black hole of all, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar, shows a predicted event horizon fairly accurately for a very specific class of rotating black holes. (Interstellar / R. Hurt / Caltech)

Of all the black holes visible from Earth, the largest is at the galactic center: 37 μas.

This multiwavelength view of the Milky Way’s galactic center goes from the X-ray through the optical and into the infrared, showcasing Sagittarius A* and the intragalactic medium located some 25,000 light years away. Using radio data, the EHT will resolve the event horizon of the central black hole. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/D.Wang et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC/S.Stolovy)

With a theoretical resolution of 15 μas, the EHT should resolve it.