It happened in 2019. You probably remember the orange, fuzzy donut that took over the internet. That was it—the first of the actual photos of black holes we’d ever seen. Before that, every single image you saw in a textbook or a sci-fi movie like Interstellar was just a very educated guess by an artist. But this? This was real. It was M87*, a supermassive beast 55 million light-years away.
Honestly, some people were underwhelmed. We’re used to 4K Hubble shots of nebulae and crisp James Webb images of deep space. Compared to those, a blurry orange ring feels... a bit low-res. But that blurriness is actually the most honest thing about the image. It represents a data-crunching feat that shouldn't have even been possible with our current technology. It’s basically like trying to photograph a grain of sand on a beach in New York from a balcony in Los Angeles.
How we actually get these photos without a giant telescope
You can't just point a normal telescope at a black hole. Black holes are, by definition, black. They don't let light escape. So, what are we even looking at? We're seeing the "shadow." It’s the light from the gas and dust swirling around the event horizon at nearly the speed of light. This stuff gets so hot it glows in radio waves.
To see something that small and that far away, you’d need a telescope the size of the entire Earth. Since we can't build a planet-sized dish (yet), the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team used a trick called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). They synced up eight different radio observatories across the globe—from the South Pole to the mountains of Chile—and turned the entire Earth into one giant virtual telescope.
Timing is everything. Every single one of those telescopes had to be perfectly synchronized using atomic clocks. If they were off by even a fraction of a billionth of a second, the whole image would just be static. They collected so much data that it couldn’t be sent over the internet. We’re talking five petabytes. They literally had to fly boxes of hard drives to a central processing center.
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The algorithm that filled the gaps
Because we don't actually have a solid telescope covering the whole Earth, there are "holes" in the data. Think of it like a broken mirror where only a few shards are left. Katie Bouman and the rest of the imaging team had to develop algorithms to fill in those missing pieces.
They didn't just "guess" what it looked like. They used different pipelines and tested them against each other to make sure they weren't just seeing what they wanted to see. The fact that several different teams, using different methods, all came up with that same "donut" shape is why we know the actual photos of black holes are legit.
Sag A* vs M87*: A Tale of Two Monsters
In 2022, we got the second one: Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This is our black hole, the one at the center of the Milky Way. You’d think it would be easier to photograph because it’s closer.
Actually, it was way harder.
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M87* is a massive, slow-moving giant. It takes days or weeks for the gas around it to complete an orbit, so it stays relatively still while the EHT takes its "long exposure." Sgr A* is much smaller. The gas around it zips around in minutes. It’s like trying to take a clear photo of a toddler who won’t stop running around the living room, whereas M87* is more like a giant, slow-moving turtle.
If you look closely at the actual photos of black holes, Sgr A* looks a bit more "blobby" with three distinct bright spots. Scientists think those might just be artifacts of the movement during the observation, or perhaps specific hotspots of magnetic activity.
Why the ring is brighter on the bottom
Notice how the bottom of the ring in the M87* photo is brighter than the top? That’s not an accident or a smudge. It’s called relativistic beaming. Basically, the gas on the bottom is moving toward us. Because it’s moving so fast, the light gets "bunched up" and appears brighter. The gas at the top is moving away, so it looks dimmer. This perfectly matches what Albert Einstein predicted over a hundred years ago. It’s kinda wild that a guy with a chalkboard and a pencil got the physics of a 6.5 billion solar-mass object right before we even knew they existed.
What’s next for black hole photography?
We aren't done. The EHT is adding more telescopes to the array. More telescopes mean more "shards of the mirror" and a sharper image. We might even get movies.
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- The Next-Generation EHT (ngEHT): This project aims to double the number of telescopes. This will allow us to see the "photon ring," a much sharper, thinner circle of light that sits even closer to the event horizon.
- Space-based Interferometry: Some scientists want to put a radio telescope in orbit. By putting one dish in space and keeping others on Earth, the "virtual telescope" becomes larger than the planet itself. The resolution would be insane.
- Polarization Photos: We've already started seeing "polarized" versions of these photos. They look like they have swirl marks or "hair" on them. This shows the magnetic fields around the black hole, which is the key to understanding how they shoot out those massive jets of energy that can span entire galaxies.
Common misconceptions about these images
- It’s not orange: The "actual" light is radio waves, which are invisible to the human eye. The orange color is a choice made by scientists to represent the intensity of the radiation. They could have made it purple or neon green, but orange feels "hot," which fits the physics.
- It’s not a "hole": It’s a sphere. We see a ring because we’re seeing the light warped around the back of it. Gravitational lensing acts like a funhouse mirror, bending light from behind the black hole so it curves around and hits our eyes.
- It isn't sucking everything in: If our Sun were replaced by a black hole of the same mass, Earth wouldn't get "sucked in." We’d just keep orbiting it in the dark. You have to get very close to the event horizon to be in real trouble.
Making sense of the scale
It’s hard to wrap your brain around how big M87* is. Our entire solar system—out to Pluto and beyond—would fit comfortably inside the dark shadow in the middle of that photo. It weighs as much as 6.5 billion suns.
When you look at actual photos of black holes, you’re looking at the edge of physics. It’s the place where General Relativity (the physics of the big) and Quantum Mechanics (the physics of the small) finally clash. So far, Einstein is winning. Every measurement we’ve taken from these photos confirms his math to a terrifying degree of accuracy.
How to stay updated on new images
If you want to follow the latest breakthroughs, don't just wait for it to hit the nightly news. The researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy are the ones doing the heavy lifting.
- Check the EHT official website: They release the raw papers and high-res downloads there.
- Follow the "Space Weather" or "ArXiv" pre-prints: This is where the nerdy, technical stuff drops first before it gets polished for the public.
- Look for polarized light updates: These are the newest "versions" of the photos that show magnetic field lines.
The next few years are going to be big. We’re moving from "Do they exist?" to "How do they work?" and eventually to "Let's watch a video of one eating a star." We're living in the first generation of humans that doesn't have to use their imagination to know what the center of a galaxy looks like.
Actionable Next Steps
To truly appreciate these images, you should look at the composite comparisons between the M87* and Sgr A* photos. Take a moment to find the "polarized" version of M87*; it reveals the magnetic "stripes" that explain how black holes launch jets of matter. If you’re a fan of the technical side, search for "Katie Bouman TED Talk" to see the specific math that turned raw radio noise into the first-ever visual proof of a black hole’s existence. Keep an eye on the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) announcements, as they are currently working on adding more satellite-linked dishes to turn these "blurry donuts" into high-definition movies.