Image of a Black Hole Revealed for First Time Ever

Why We Haven’t Seen a Black Hole Until Now

If you take a moment to think about it, it isn’t hard to see why capturing an image of a black hole hasn’t been done until now. Black holes are the most exotic structures in physics, objects so massive and so dense that their gravity captures every form of radiation that crosses their event horizon. Without radiation, including visible light, a black hole literally cannot be seen against the backdrop of space and their incredible density and compact dimensions make it all but statistically impossible to identify a black hole by it’s eclipsing of some background source of radiation.

They have proven to be so elusive that until today, there were some who argued that black holes didn’t even exist.

We’ve long been certain of their existence, however, by the effects its gravity has on its surroundings. The existence of black holes have long been taken for granted because of the severe affect its gravity has on the orbits of stars in the galactic core. In the above time-lapse video from the European Southern Observatory taken over 20 years, the elliptical orbit of the star closest to Sagittarius A*, the SMBH that sits in the center of our galaxy, shows the star accelerating to a significant fraction of the speed of light at the perigee of its orbit, that is its closest position relative to the object it orbits, which could only be produced by an object of immense mass that could only be a SMBH.

While incredibly strong evidence of the existence of black holes, this still isn’t directly observing the thing itself.

RELATED: WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE A BLACK HOLE

In order to capture an image of any significant detail, scientists needed to capture the radiation from M87 SMBH at a wavelength of 1 mm. Our most high resolution radio telescopes are capable of capturing 1 cm wavelengths, so anything below that was necessarily bound to be blurry and distorted, especially when considering all of the gases, temperature anomalies, and other conditions that could distort the radio waves coming from just before the event horizon of a SMBH.

That is what makes the achievement of the EHT so incredible.

How the Event Horizon Telescope Pulled It Off

In order to capture the wavelength required to capture a detailed image of a SMBH, a radio telescope thousands of miles wide would be required. Given the impossibility of building one physically, the EHT decided to build one virtually.

Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), astronomers constructed a network of radio telescopes around the world and coordinated their efforts to produce a series of images from different vantage points. Collecting one million gigabytes of data over several days, a computer algorithm has spent the past two years stitching together the different data to effectively create a gigantic virtual radio telescope as wide as the Earth itself, allowing it to achieve the resolution necessary to capture the detailed image shown off today.

This story is developing.