That mystique is going to be made more real." The mystique of black holes in the community is very substantial. "To see the stuff going down the tubes, so to speak, to see it firsthand. "It's just seriously cool," said John Kormendy, a University of Texas astronomer who wasn't part of the discovery team. He added: "Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but there's literally nothing like a picture of the real universe, however fuzzy and monochromatic." 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." The project cost $50 million to $60 million, with $26 million of that coming from the National Science Foundation. (The lead scientists in the discovery are from Harvard, but Loeb was not involved.) 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. What the image shows is gas heated to millions of degrees by the friction of ever-stronger gravity, scientists said. "Making it these warm gold and oranges makes sense." They chose "exquisite gold because this light is so hot," Dempsey said. The measurements are taken at a wavelength the human eye cannot see, so the astronomers added color to the image. That's because that light is approaching Earth. "It's circular, but on one side the light is brighter," Dempsey said. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, she 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 Einstein's general relativity theory, Dempsey said. 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. Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize, just like the gravitational wave discovery. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world in several news conferences, adds light to that sound. 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. This one's "event horizon" - the point of no return around it, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the abyss - is as big as our entire solar system.
Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin.
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