Once thought to be impossible, these images of a black hole, 54 million light years away, are one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs in human history.
For years, black holes have occupied a curious place, long straddling the line between science and science fiction. They’ve been proven time and time again by models and equations, originating in 1915 with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity – but we’ve never been able to actually see one. This all changed on Wednesday, when an international consortium of researchers showed the world the first ever image of a black hole, over 50 million light years away.
The picture shows what looks like a flaming orange and red ring with a black circle in the middle, surrounded by darkness on all sides. This supermassive black hole sits at the centre of Messier 87, a galaxy 54 million light years away (and is one of the largest known galaxies in our universe), nested in the Virgo cluster. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.
In a series of six papers published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers detailed the process of producing these images (there were four images in total). They captured the black hole with the Event Horizons Telescope (EHT), which is a misnomer – in fact, it is eight telescopes, scattered across six continents (with contributions from over 200 scientists), forming a kind of franken-telescope that is virtually the size of the planet. Data was sifted through and stitched together using a technique called interferometry, over the course of two years, to create the images that we see today.
The picture of the black hole confirms Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
