The first ever picture of a black hole has spurred excitement in the science community. Originally, black holes were merely a thought experiment, an imagining of matter crushed to a point. Einstein himself thought that nature wouldn’t allow black holes to exist. In fact, there are possibly billions of them, all of them tiny in comparison to their mass. This tininess has presented the challenge of photographing black holes. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) was created to overcome these challenges, and it eventually succeeded it taking a picture of the black hole in the galaxy M87 (though it was initially intended to snap the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*).
Key Takeaways:
- The Event Horizon Telescope is made up of multiple telescopes to help capture pictures of black holes.`
- The Event Horizon Telescope recently was able to capture an image of a black hole at Messier 87 some 55 million miles from Earth.
- Black holes carry a huge amount of mass, but are very small in size and out own galaxy could have lots of these.
“I am moved by the image of a species looking at an image of a curious empty hole looming in space.”
