How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? | Quanta Magazine

Black holes are one of the universe’s most exotic and elusive objects. When nothing, not even light, can escape their powerful gravitational grasp, taking a picture of one seems unimaginable. But an image of a black hole, or more accurately its shadow, could offer insights that theory alone may not provide when testing predictions. So how can it be done? Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and a team of 250 researchers achieved this extraordinary feat by linking a group of radio telescopes around the world. This network, called the Event Horizon Telescope, produced the first image of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, around 55 million light-years away, and the first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy. In this episode, Doeleman tells co-host Janna Levin how he turned the Earth into a telescope capable of seeing a black hole, the incredible level of science and collaboration that was required to achieve this, how the images have furthered our understanding of these exotic objects, and how movies of black holes may be possible by the early 2030s. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta. Transcript JANNA LEVIN: Okay. I’m Janna Levin STEVE STROGATZ: And I’m Steve Strogatz. LEVIN: And this is The Joy of Why STROGATZ: A podcast from Quanta Magazine where we look at some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. LEVIN: Welcome to another episode. STROGATZ: Great to see you. LEVIN: Great to see you. I’m pretty excited about this one. I cannot deny or hide it. We’re talking about not only an area where I’ve spent a lot of my life black holes — the greatest, strangest topic out there — but also I had a chance to talk to an old friend. So it’s a fun episode, I hope. STROGATZ: I’m really looking forward to hearing it. I know you’ve always had a special affection for black holes. I’ve had a chance to interview you in some earlier version of this. LEVIN: That’s right. STROGATZ: And you blew my mind over and over about black holes. LEVIN: Yeah, they require some defense. They’ve got a bad reputation, not entirely earned. STROGATZ: What’s the bad reputation? Because they like to eat things? LEVIN: Yeah. You know, black holes, kind of this monster truck language around black holes all the time. You know, they’re like… But actually, black holes are remarkably elegant, clean, simple systems. They leave you alone if you leave them alone. They’re actually quite small for their heft. That’s kind of their whole gestalt, that they’re actually tiny for their heft. And, uh, you know, though they’re the darkest phenomenon in the universe, they figure out a way to become the brightest beacons that we see on the edge of what’s observable. STROGATZ: Wow. LEVIN: So, they’re, they’re pretty awesome. I also think that they’re fundamental to physics, unlike any other macroscopic object you can think of. STROGATZ: Hmmm. When I think of black holes, I tend to focus on what they do to spacetime. You know, that they cause singularities. It’s their geometry that always grabs me. But that’s not really necessarily the only way to think about black holes. They’re really objects. Real players. LEVIN: Yeah. I think after people got over the thrill that they actually existed out there and that they could indirectly be detected, there was a sense that they’re not major players in the universe. “Eh, so there’s some black holes out there.” Quite to the contrary, I think we’ve come to understand that they sculpt our history and our past, that they have a very regulating and important role in determining the shape and size of galaxies and where there might be habitable regions even. And ultimately, we’re kinda doomed to fall into black holes eventually. So, they’re kind of our past and our future. But, it might surprise people that we had never actually taken a picture of a black hole. All of our evidence had been indirect until about 10 years ago, and that group worked for well over a decade, for some people up to two decades, to try to capture the first picture of a black hole. STROGATZ: Huh.

Wild.