Recently, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) managed to capture a photo of the black hole Messer 87 (M87). This is incredible because despite weighing in at 6.5 billion times that of the sun it is roughly 53.5 million light-years away. This means the Event Horizon Telescope’s view of the black hole, despite being about the same size as our Solar System, is only 40 micro arc seconds across when viewed from earth. To put that into perspective it is”equivalent to reading a text on a phone in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris”(sciencedaily.com). To accomplish such a feat, 200 scientists from all across the world came together and using eleven radio telescopes based in Hawaii, Antarctica, Europe, North America, and South America managed to capture several petabytes of data using those telescope arrays to create a telescope effectively the size of the earth. From this data, four separate teams independently generated their own images using their own techniques then compared their images to verify that there was no bias in the results. The four images all matched so the teams then took 3 more images of the black hole and averaged them to generate the incredible photo that we have today. The reason this is such a historic event is that this photo agrees with Einstein’s theory of relativity from 103 years ago and finally proves that black holes do in fact exist. More radio telescopes are planning to join the Event Horizon Telescope so that the image of M87 can be made clearer and to attempt to take a photo of Sagittarius A the black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy which despite being 1,000 times smaller than M87 is roughly 1,000 times closer. The only thing making it hard to photograph is the dense collection of stars that lie near the center of the galaxy that obscures it from us.

I believe this achievement is incredible because it is something that was thought to be impossible until recently. It also is great because it lines up so closely with what experts expected and it was even extremely close in size and mass to what was predicted due to the orbits of stars near the black holes. I believe one of the researchers, Dimitrios Psaltus, really summed up the effect that this picture has on what we have learned from this picture with this quote: “I’m sure many other times in human history, people saw something for the first time … and what you see, you cannot unsee. This is it for the rest of humanity, for the rest of human history.”

Resources:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190410091028.htm

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18302343/first-picture-black-hole-eht-photo-event-horizon