2019 brought us the first image of a black hole. A movie may be next
Black holes are notoriously bashful beasts. The supermassive monsters that dwell at the centers of galaxies weigh millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and control the fates of everything in their vicinity, including light. Despite such outsize influence over their home galaxies, black holes never show their faces. 12019 Top 10See full list Until now. After more than a decade of work, results from the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, stunned the world this year with the first direct image of a black hole’s event horizon, the region beyond which not even light can escape. To make this remarkable image, scientists cobbled together a massive “telescope” by connecting seven observatories around the world to create a tool effectively the size of Earth (SN: 4/27/19, p. 7). The result: a picture of the round silhouette of a black hole against the ringlike backdrop of its brightly glowing accretion disk, the gas and other material drawn in by...