WASHINGTON, D.C. — Scientists today shared the first picture to show the immediate surroundings of a galaxy’s supermassive black hole, captured by a network of radio telescopes that adds up to what could be considered the world’s widest observatory.
A project called the Event Horizon Telescope delivered a fuzzy view of the dark monster at the center of an elliptical galaxy known as M87. The edge of the black hole’s dark circle, known as the event horizon, was surrounded by the bright glare of superheated material falling into the black hole.
“This is a remarkable achievement. … It’s almost humbling in a certain way,” EHT project director Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said during a news briefing here at the National Press Club.
