See a black hole for the first time in a historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope

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The new image comes from the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves. The image revealed Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in news conferences in six other cities across the globe shows the dark silhouette of the black hole against the hot, glowing material that surrounds it.

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Over the course of a week in April 2017, EHT astronomers on four continents coordinated their efforts to make observations of the supermassive black hole. The two targeted black holes — in the center of the Milky Way and in M87 — are roughly the same apparent size when seen from Earth, because although the M87 black hole is much larger it’s also much farther away.

To perform the observation, the astronomers battled bad weather and glitchy electric grids. They donned oxygen tanks and climbed three-mile-high mountains to escape the interference of Earth’s atmosphere. Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT. Finally, they tested their findings against the results of a million simulations of what a black hole might look like, until at last they spotted a match.

“It’s truly remarkable It’s almost humbling in a certain way,” said Shep Doeleman, director of the EHT after explaining how observatories across the planet were used to create a single instrument in effect.

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After five nights of observing (with one rest day while heavy winds rocked the project’s Mexico telescope), the project had collected 5 billion megabytes of data — the equivalent of 960 hard drives containing two billion high quality photographs.

Somewhere in that vast collection was the image of a black hole. Now the scientists had to find it.

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