Last year, we finally photographed a black hole. Now what?
Future black hole images could look sharper, although probably not as sharp as this rendering. ( NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman/)It took Sheperd Doeleman nearly a decade to pull off the impossible. As the director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project involving an international collaboration of hundreds of researchers, he spent years flying suitcases full of hard drives around the globe to coordinate observations between radio telescopes on four continents, including Antarctica. On April 9, 2019, the collaboration at last released the fruits of their labors and the world gazed upon the first image of a black hole. The feat—which pioneering black hole theorist James Bardeen called hopeless in 1973—represented a towering achievement of astronomical technology. But once the data processing was done and the champagne popped, the EHT collaboration in some sense resembled the dog who caught the car. “It took everyone a little by surprise...