More than half a dozen scientific raising hopes that astronomers have for the first time imaged a black hole, objects with gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape.
Although their existence is now almost universally accepted, mostly from the effect of their gravity on nearby objects, no one has actually seen one.
Black holes themselves are entirely dark and featureless. The giant ones at the centers of galaxies are also surprisingly small, despite containing millions or billions of times the mass of our sun.
To make observing them yet more difficult, those giants are shrouded in clouds of dust and gas. But streams of superhot gas swirl around the holes, emanating radio waves about a millimeter in wavelength that can penetrate those clouds.
Two years ago, an international collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) corralled time on eight different radio telescopes around the world to try to image the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, and another at the center of nearby galaxy M87.
They used a technique known as interferometry to combine the output of the globally scattered instruments to produce images as if from a single dish as wide as Earth. A dish that large is needed to see the details of something that would fit easily within the orbit of Mercury and is 26,000 light-years away.
Their 5 nights of observing produced 4 petabytes of data. If that amount of data was music stored as MP3s, it would take 8000 years to play. The team has spent the past 2 years correlating, calibrating, and interpreting the data and they are now preparing to show us the results.
In February, in anticipation of the EHT results, Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Paris Observatory in Meudon, France, released an illustrated history of black hole imaging that records decades of progress from pen-and-ink drawings to supercomputer simulations and Hollywood movies.