Yesterday, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first image of a black hole humanity has ever seen. That simple-looking image represents a century of scientific work: from the first theoretical calculations describing black holes; to the earliest hints that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its heart; to the technological advances needed to network a world-spanning array of radio telescopes. When I was in college and graduate school, many people thought this very thing was impossible — I know I did. I am happy to say I was wrong then, and this picture of the 6.5 billion solar-mass black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87 is the most thrilling image of my scientific and science-writing career thus far.

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The incredible story behind our first image of a black hole

For the first time ever, scientists have captured a direct image of a black hole. The image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, allows us to see something that was thought to be invisible

For WIRED UK:

A black hole is invisible by nature. One of the strangest predictions to come out of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole emits no radiation we can detect, and it swallows up everything that falls on it, matter and light alike. The boundary of a black hole — its event horizon — is a border that can only be crossed from the outside to the inside, not in reverse.

So it might seem paradoxical to talk about capturing an image of a black hole, but this is precisely the mission of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Today, April 10, 2019, will go down in history as the day EHT scientists released the very first direct image of a black hole.

It’s not one in our own Galactic centre, but is at the centre of the galaxy M87 – a resident of the neighbouring Virgo galaxy cluster, which is the home of several trillion stars. The feat marks the first time in history that astronomers have seen the shape of an event horizon. It’s an unprecedented map of gravity at its strongest, involving hundreds of astronomers, engineers, and data scientists from around the world.

[Read the rest at WIRED UK…]