WASHINGTON (AP) Scientists this morning revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting a fiery orange and black ring of gravity-twisted light swirling around the edges of the abyss.
Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers captured a picture of the hot, shadowy edges of a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades. It is along those edges that light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect.
We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is, said Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard.
Jessica Dempsey, a co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, said it reminded her of the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This ones event horizon the point of no return around it, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the hole is as big as our entire solar system.
Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Albert Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world in several news conferences, adds light to that sound.
Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize, just like the gravitational wave discovery.
While much around a black hole falls into a death spiral and is never to be seen again, the new image captures lucky gas and dust circling at just far enough to be safe and seen millions of years later on Earth, Dempsey said.
Taken over four days when astronomers had to have the perfect weather all across the world and literally all the stars had to align, the image helps confirm Einsteins general relativity theory, Dempsey said. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, she said.
Its circular, but on one side the light is brighter, Dempsey said. Thats because that light is approaching Earth.
The measurements are taken at a wavelength the human eye cannot see, so the astronomers added color to the image. They chose exquisite gold because this light is so hot, Dempsey said. Making it these warm gold and oranges makes sense.
What the image shows is gas heated to millions of degrees by the friction of ever-stronger gravity, scientists said. And that gravity creates a funhouse effect where you see light from both behind the black hole and behind you as the light curves and circles around the black hole itself, said astronomer Avi Loeb, director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard. (The lead scientists in the discovery are from Harvard, but Loeb was not involved.)
The project cost $50 million to $60 million, with $26 million of that coming from the National Science Foundation.
Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Ethan Vishniac, who was not part of the discovery team but edits the journal where the research was published, pronounced the image an amazing technical achievement that gives us a glimpse of gravity in its most extreme manifestation.
He added: Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but theres literally nothing like a picture of the real universe, however fuzzy and monochromatic.
