The image is the result of a global collaboration and human ingenuity — a discovery that will change our perception of the universe forever
Lurking in the massive elliptical galaxy Messier 87 is a monster. It’s a supermassive black hole, 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun, crammed inside an event horizon measuring half a light-day across. It’s very far away, over 50 million light-years, but, today, astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have delivered on a promise that has been two decades in the making: They’ve recorded the first ever image of the bright ring of emissions immediately surrounding M87’s event horizon, the point at which our universe ends and only mystery lies beyond.
The magnitude of this achievement is historic. Not only does this single image prove that black holes actually exist, it is a stunning confirmation of the predictions of general relativity at its most extreme. If this theoretical framework acted somehow differently at the event horizon, the image wouldn’t look as it does. The reality is that general relativity has precisely predicted the size, shape and form of this distant object to an incredible degree of precision.
In the run-up to today’s announcement, I had the incredible fortune to write the University of Waterloo’s press release and feature about the EHT with Avery Broderick, a professor at Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a key member of the international EHT Collaboration. You can read the releases here:
Unmasking a Monster (feature)
First Image of Black Hole Captured (news)
I especially enjoyed discussing Avery’s personal excitement and passion for this project: “I would hope that an image like this will galvanize a sense of exploration; an exploration of the mind and that of the universe,” he said. “If we can excite people, inspire them to embark on a voyage of discovery in this new EHT era of observational black hole physics, I can only imagine that it will have profound consequences for humanity moving forward.”
Like the discovery of the Higgs boson and the detection of gravitational waves, the first image of a black hole will have as much of an impact on society as it will on science and, like Avery, I hope it inspires the next generation of scientists, driving our passion for exploration and understanding how our universe works.
Wow, what a morning.
Watch the NSF’s recording of today’s live feed here:
astroengine.com 
Where’s Sagittarius A*’s image?
It hasn’t been released yet, but it will be soon-ish (I hope). There’s a whole bunch of different challenges when trying to image our black hole, which as emissions that vary quickly. Also, as we are inside the disk of the galaxy which contains a lot of dust, there’s the effect of scattering in the EHT’s signal. M87 is less variable, and there’s only empty space between us and it, which makes it a comparatively easy target to resolve