For the First Time, We Have a Picture of a Black Hole

Normally I'd use this week's post for the first half of a golf course review, but not this week. For one, the review isn't close to being finished yet. Also, this news is probably way more interesting than some golf course in West Virginia.

This has been a long time coming. We have actual pictures of a black hole, the thing that's so dense not even light can escape. Yes, we took a picture of an an object that literally cannot emit light. And here it is.

Event Horizon Telescope

It's strange how something can be exactly what you expect but still be compelling. I mean, of course that's what a black hole would look like, a black point surrounded by superheated gas blasting out all sorts of interesting radiation. But the possibilities for new science that this opens are enormous.

Anyway, the black hole we've photographed is the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a massive elliptical galaxy. The black hole has a mass of 6.5 billion suns, so even though the galaxy lies 50 million light years away, it was a reasonable target. Easier than the Milky Way's own black hole, which is a mere 4 million solar masses.

The act of getting the pictures took years and the combined efforts of observatories all over the world. The pictures were so massive that they couldn't be sent over the internet, it was faster to store them and ship them around.

Once again, this is some sort of accomplishment. I really never thought we'd get a picture like that now. It's a black hole, after all, and yet, here we are. Astronomy is pretty cool sometimes.