Honestly, the first time I saw the images of real black holes back in 2019, I was a little underwhelmed. It looked like a blurry, orange donut. Or maybe a smudge on a camera lens. After decades of Hollywood giving us high-definition, shimmering cosmic gateways, the reality felt... low-res. But that’s the thing about science. It doesn’t care about your aesthetic expectations.
That "smudge" was actually the M87* black hole, located 55 million light-years away. To see it, we basically turned the entire Earth into one giant telescope. Think about that for a second. We didn't just point a lens at the sky; we synchronized atomic clocks across continents to capture light that had been traveling since before humans even existed.
The donut in the room: What are we actually looking at?
When we talk about images of real black holes, we aren't actually seeing the black hole itself. That’s physically impossible. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. If you’re looking at it, you’re looking at nothing. Total darkness.
What we see is the "shadow."
Around that darkness is a chaotic, swirling mess of superheated gas and dust called the accretion disk. This stuff is moving at relativistic speeds—nearly the speed of light. Because of that friction and gravity, it glows in radio waves. The "donut" shape is basically the last glimpse of light before it crosses the event horizon and vanishes forever.
Why the bottom is brighter
If you look closely at the M87* image or the 2022 image of Sagittarius A* (the one in our own galaxy), you’ll notice one side of the ring is brighter than the other. It’s not an accident. It’s Doppler beaming.
Material in the disk is spinning toward us on one side and away from us on the other. The stuff moving toward us appears brighter and more intense. It’s essentially the visual version of an ambulance siren changing pitch as it drives past you. Physics is weird like that.
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How the Event Horizon Telescope actually works
You can't just buy a telescope at a hobby shop and expect to see a black hole. The resolution required is insane. Katie Bouman and the EHT team often use the same analogy: it’s like trying to see an orange on the surface of the moon while standing on Earth.
To pull this off, they used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).
They linked eight different radio telescopes—from the South Pole to the high deserts of Chile and the mountains of Hawaii. By combining the data from all these sites, they created a "virtual" telescope the size of our planet.
- The Data Problem: They didn't send the data over the internet. It was too big. We're talking five petabytes of data. They had to physically fly crates of hard drives to central processing centers because the "bandwidth" of a cargo plane full of disks is still higher than any fiber optic cable we have.
- The Math: Algorithms had to fill in the gaps. Since we don't have a telescope that literally covers every square inch of Earth, the EHT had to use complex mathematics to reconstruct the image from the sparse data points they collected.
Sgr A* vs. M87*: A tale of two giants
In 2022, we finally got a look at Sagittarius A*, the monster living in the center of the Milky Way. Even though it’s much closer to us than M87*, it was actually harder to photograph.
Why? Because it’s smaller.
[Image comparing M87* and Sagittarius A* black hole images]
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M87* is a behemoth. It’s roughly the size of our entire solar system. Because it’s so big, the gas orbiting it takes days or even weeks to complete a circuit. This makes it a "steady" subject for a photo. Sagittarius A* is a relative shrimp. The gas orbits it in minutes. Trying to take its picture is like trying to photograph a puppy that won't stop chasing its tail while you’re using a long-exposure setting. The image is naturally fuzzier because the subject was moving while the "shutter" was open.
The 2023 Upgrade
In 2023, researchers used a new machine-learning algorithm called PRIMO to sharpen the original M87* image. The result was a much thinner, more defined ring. It’s the highest resolution we’ve ever achieved. It confirmed that the "shadow" was exactly the size Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted it would be.
Einstein remains undefeated.
Why don't they look like Gargantua from Interstellar?
The black hole in Interstellar was actually based on real physics, but it was "cleaned up" for the audience. In the movie, you see a thin line of light across the middle—that’s the back of the accretion disk being warped by gravity so that it appears to be on top and bottom of the black hole.
Images of real black holes show this too, but we are looking at them from a different angle. Also, our current telescopes don't have the "visual acuity" to see those razor-thin lines of light yet. We’re seeing a blurred version of that reality.
Think of it like the difference between a 1920s silent film and a 4K IMAX movie. We are currently in the "silent film" era of black hole photography.
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The future of cosmic photography
We are just getting started. There are plans to put radio telescopes into orbit. By putting a telescope in space and linking it to the ones on Earth, we can create a virtual telescope larger than the planet itself.
This would allow us to take actual movies of black holes.
Imagine watching the accretion disk of Sagittarius A* swirl in real-time. We’d be able to see "flares" of light when the black hole eats a particularly large chunk of matter. We’d be able to test gravity in environments so extreme that our current understanding of physics might just break.
How to stay updated on new findings
If you're fascinated by this, don't just wait for the news to hit the front page of Reddit.
- Follow the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration directly. They release their papers on open-access repositories like arXiv.
- Check out the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. While it won't take close-up "ring" photos like the EHT, its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will identify millions of new black holes by watching how they interact with stars around them.
- Look into the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data. JWST can't "see" the event horizon ring (it looks in infrared, not radio), but it’s amazing at seeing the dust clouds and jets of energy shooting out from the centers of galaxies where these monsters live.
The next time you see one of these "blurry" images, remember that you’re looking at the edge of existence. It’s the point where space and time literally end. That orange smudge is arguably the most significant photograph ever taken by human beings.
Next Steps for Enthusiasts:
If you want to dive deeper into the actual data behind these images of real black holes, your best bet is to visit the Event Horizon Telescope's official gallery. They provide high-resolution downloads and, more importantly, the "fitter" versions of the images that show the different mathematical models used to create the final picture. You can also explore the NASA Exoplanet Archive to see how black hole mass correlates with galaxy formation, which provides the necessary context for why these images matter for the "big picture" of our universe's history.