Never before have scientists photographed the darkest points in the universe.
At the darkest points in the universe, their boundaries perilous and invisible, space warps. In a black hole, the force of gravity is so strong that anything that comes near, whether a puff of cosmic dust or an entire blazing star, is swallowed and devoured. The light sinks past a point of no return and into an unknown realm that can only be imagined.
Black holes sound like an invention of science fiction, but they’re as real as the stars and planets and moons—they’re everywhere, millions and millions of them scattered across the cosmos. Mysterious as they are, they can be found.
Astronomers have detected black holes in the whirling movements of stars and spinning rings of gas and dust that coalesce around a seemingly empty spot in space. They have detected them in bright beacons of ejected particles, the cosmic burps of a hearty meal. They have even detected them in gravitational waves, the faint ripples that distort the very fabric of space and time when two black holes collide.
But no one’s ever really seen a black hole—until now.
Astronomers on Wednesday released the first direct image of a black hole, pieced together from observations by telescopes around the world.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the head of the effort, known as the Event Horizon Telescope.
Read: About that monstrous black hole we’re all orbiting
The black hole resides at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, named for the 18th-century French astronomer who discovered it. Messier is one of the biggest nearby galaxies. The black hole at its center has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.
The photographic evidence of a long-unseen cosmic force is an extraordinary achievement in science. Messier 87 is located about 55 million light-years from Earth. The electromagnetic radiation there—the kinds of signals scientists seek to detect—took a very long time to reach the planet, longer than any human beings have been around. By the time it arrived, they had figured out how to peer back into the depths and snap a picture.
Exciting as it is, the photo actually doesn’t capture the black hole itself, nor its interior.
