Our first look at a black hole

Image from the National Science Foundation.


So I said I would break my blogging sabbatical if something big happened.

Well, it has.

Yesterday, in a series of press conferences around the world, astronomers and other space scientists announced that we at last have an image of an actual black hole. The image was obtained by specifically linking together a series radio telescopes located around the Earth, an effort called Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The black hole pictured is located in the M87 galaxy near the Virgo galaxy cluster, about 55 million light-years from Earth. As predicted by Einstein's general relativity theory, the picture depicts a dark, empty region in the center and a glow of superheated gas and matter being drawn in by the hole's immense gravity.

I honestly didn't think I would see this in my lifetime. When I heard last week that this news would be released, yesterday morning had a certain "Christmas morning" feeling to it.

There's something very human about this news. For a long while now, black holes were something astronomer's believed in, but never saw. Now when I say "believed in," I don't mean that in necessarily a "leap of faith" sense. The mathematics were there, the gravitational effects on nearby stars were there, but we just didn't have the means to see a black hole with our eyes. To see what we always sensed was there, to view it in the most tangible means available, answers so many questions for us. While at the same time, it raises just as many others. Ain't that existence, though?

Additionally, as we go through a time of what looks like great division, it's nice to remember that humans of many nations can still do great things when we work together. One motivation for such behavior is studying the universe...something that is certainly bigger than any of us or all of us put together.

So, yeah. I'm loving this.

By the by, if you're loving it too, then thank Dr. Katie Bouman for the discovery. Her keen mathematical alacrity came up with the algorithm that helped make the EHT possible. Let's hear it for more women in STEM making great contributions to humanity.

Sure wish Stephen Hawking had been here to see this picture. Well, I like to think he saw it before any of the rest of us did.



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