In 2019, astronomers revealed that they took a picture of a gargantuan black hole at the heart of the nearby galaxy Messier 87—the first visual evidence of a black hole. For NationalSpaceDay, here's a look back at that milestone:
At last, we can see it: a black hole in the flesh. Astronomers today revealed a picture of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of the nearby galaxy Messier 87 . The result—a ring of fire surrounding the blackest of shadows—is a powerful confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, or general relativity, which was used to predict black holes 80 years ago.
In the team's images, the bottom of the ring appears bright because the gases there are being Doppler-boosted, whipped toward Earth. The black hole bends light around it, creating a circular shadow. General relativity predicts that the shadow ought to be round to within 10%, says Avery Broderick, an EHT member and astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, whereas alternative theories of gravity predict distorted, noncircular shapes.
No existing telescope has the resolution to see such a distant, tiny object. So, the EHT team coopted most of the millimeter-wave telescopes worldwide and combined their data to produce a virtual telescope the size of Earth through a process called very-long-baseline interferometry. The telescopes they used stretched from Hawaii to Arizona, Mexico to Spain, and Chile to the South Pole.
"It was a pretty gruesome process to crunch all the data," Falcke says. Powerful processors called correlators compare readings between pairs of telescopes at different distances and orientations to the black holes. Özel compares it to building up a 3D image of the body with a computerized tomography scan, but in this case they do not have all the orientations they need.
However, for decades, most physicists and astronomers thought such an idea was just a mathematical curiosity. It wasn't until 1939 that U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and colleagues predicted that a massive star could actually collapse to a point. The most compelling evidence came in 2015, with the detection by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory of ripples in space-time emitted by the cataclysmic merger of two black holes. With today's announcement, however, astronomers finally have visual evidence."I've always wanted to see that damned thing," Falcke says.
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