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The Shadow of a Black Hole

From NOVA:

The invisible manifests itself through the visible: so say many of the great works of philosophy, poetry, and religion. It’s also true in physics: we can’t see atoms or electrons directly and dark matter seems to be entirely transparent, yet this invisible stuff makes and shapes the universe as we know it.

Then there are black holes: though they are the most extreme gravitational powerhouses in the cosmos, they are invisible to our telescopes. Black holes are the unseen hand steering the evolution of galaxies, sometimes encouraging new star formation, sometimes throttling it. The material they send jetting away changes the chemistry of entire galaxies. When they take the form of quasars and blazars, black holes are some of the brightest single objects in the universe, visible billions of light-years away. The biggest supermassive black holes are billions of times as massive as the Sun. They are engines of creation and destruction that put the known laws of physics to their most extreme test. Yet, we can’t actually see them. [read the rest at NOVA…]

This piece, which emphasizes the great science coming from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is a  companion to my earlier NOVA essay, “Do we need to rewrite general relativity?”