You’ve seen it. That glowing, slightly blurry, orange ring of fire suspended in a void of absolute nothingness. When the first images of black holes hit the internet in 2019, some people were honestly a little underwhelmed. They expected Interstellar. They wanted high-definition, swirling 4K cosmic whirlpools. Instead, we got a "fuzzy donut."
But here is the thing about that donut: it’s the most important picture ever taken.
It isn't a "photograph" in the way your iPhone takes a photo. You can’t just point a lens at M87* or Sagittarius A* and click. Black holes are, by definition, invisible. They swallow light. To get these images of black holes, scientists had to turn the entire planet into one giant telescope. It’s a feat of sheer engineering willpower that borders on the impossible.
Basically, we aren't seeing the hole. We are seeing the silhouette of a monster.
The Impossible Physics of Seeing Nothing
To understand images of black holes, you have to understand the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This isn't one piece of hardware sitting on a mountain in Hawaii. It’s a global network of radio dishes synced up with atomic clocks.
Why radio waves? Because space is dusty.
If you try to look at the center of our galaxy with visible light, you see a wall of soot and gas. Radio waves, however, zip right through that junk. By linking telescopes in Antarctica, Chile, Spain, and Mexico, the EHT created a virtual lens the size of Earth. This technique is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). It’s complex. It’s finicky. If one telescope has bad weather, the whole data set can get wonky.
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When the EHT targeted M87*, a supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away, they were looking for a needle in a haystack—if the haystack was in another city and the needle was made of ghost-matter. The resolution required is equivalent to standing in New York and trying to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles.
Why the Orange Ring?
That glow isn't fire. It's friction.
Gas and dust are spiraling into the abyss at nearly the speed of light. They bump into each other. They get hot. Like, billions of degrees hot. This creates a plasma that radiates energy. The reason the bottom of the ring in the images of black holes usually looks brighter is due to "Doppler beaming." The stuff moving toward us appears brighter; the stuff moving away looks dimmer.
It’s literally Einstein’s General Relativity playing out in real-time.
Katie Bouman, a computer scientist who became the face of the imaging algorithm, helped develop the "CHIRP" method to stitch the data together. The telescopes don't produce a "picture." They produce petabytes of data—so much data that it was faster to fly hard drives on planes than to upload them over the internet.
The computers then had to fill in the gaps. Imagine a puzzle where 90% of the pieces are missing, but you know the laws of physics, so you can guess what the picture should look like. That's how we got the first images of black holes.
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Sagittarius A* vs. M87*
In 2022, we finally got a look at "our" black hole—Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). It sits at the heart of the Milky Way.
You’d think it would be easier to photograph since it's closer. Nope.
Sgr A* is a "small" black hole compared to the beast in M87. While M87* is so massive that gas takes days or weeks to orbit it, the gas around Sgr A* completes an orbit in minutes. It's constantly flickering. It's like trying to take a long-exposure photo of a toddler who won't stop running. M87* was a sitting duck; Sgr A* was a moving target.
This is why the images of black holes in our own backyard look even blurrier. The EHT team had to develop entirely new tools to account for the "glimmering" of the light as it moved during the observation.
What the Movies Got Wrong (and Right)
We have to talk about Interstellar. Kip Thorne, a Nobel-winning physicist, worked on that movie to make the black hole "Gargantua" look as real as possible.
In the movie, you see a thin line of light crossing the middle. That’s the accretion disk. But because the black hole warps spacetime, you also see the back of the disk looped over the top and bottom. It’s a gravitational funhouse mirror.
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The real images of black holes we have now don't show that thin line clearly because our resolution isn't high enough yet. We are seeing the "shadow" and the blurred glow. But the math matches. Einstein was right. Again. It’s almost annoying how right he was.
The Future: Moving Pictures and Space Telescopes
What’s next? We want movies.
Static images of black holes are just the beginning. The EHT is working on "next-generation" upgrades (ngEHT). By adding more telescopes to the array—some perhaps even in orbit—we can increase the frame rate. We could actually watch the plasma swirl. We could see flares erupting from the event horizon.
There are also plans to launch radio telescopes into space. If the Earth-sized telescope gave us a blurry donut, a telescope array the size of the Moon’s orbit would give us 4K.
How to Follow the Science
If you're fascinated by these images of black holes, don't just look at the JPGs on news sites. There are ways to dig deeper into the actual data.
- Check the EHT data portal. They actually release the "calibrated data" for public use. If you’re a coding nerd, you can try your hand at reconstruction.
- Follow the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) updates. While EHT does radio waves, JWST looks at the infrared environment around black holes. It’s seeing the "neighborhood" while EHT sees the "front door."
- Watch the "black hole weather." Scientists are now monitoring the variability of Sgr A* in real-time. Changes in its brightness tell us about the magnetic fields "choking" the black hole.
The journey from a theoretical math equation in 1915 to a tangible image in 2019 is one of the greatest arcs in human history. We aren't just looking at light. We are looking at the edge of existence.
To stay truly updated on the latest images of black holes, monitor the Event Horizon Telescope’s official publication list at eventhorizontelescope.org. They typically drop major announcements in synchronized global press conferences. The next big milestone will likely be the first "video" of Sgr A* or M87*, which will settle debates about how magnetic fields actually launch those massive jets of particles we see shooting out into deep space. Pay close attention to the "photon ring" research; finding that thin, sharp circle of light inside the fuzzy donut is the "Holy Grail" for the next decade of astrophysics.