(cinematic futuristic music)
Something extraordinary is happening today.
It's one of those moments when someone has the inspiration
and courage to test a profound new idea.
Lurking in the heart of a supergiant elliptical galaxy
is an invisible leviathan so terrifying
it defies the imagination.
It warps the very fabric of space,
and bends the flow of time.
Anything that approaches is trapped by its gravity,
never to return.
It is a supermassive black hole.
It's name is M87.
Now, history is being made.
A direct photograph has just been released.
And we are delighted to be able to report to you today
that we have seen what we thought was unseeable.
We have seen, and taken a picture, of a black hole.
(audience applauding)
Here it is.
This is a remarkable achievement.
What you're seeing here is the last photon orbit.
What you are seeing is evidence of an event horizon.
By laying a ruler across this black hole,
we now have visual evidence for a black hole.
We now know that a black hole
that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does
exists in the center of M87,
and this is the strongest evidence that we have to date
for the existence of black holes.
And it is also consistent, the shape of this shadow,
to the precision of our measurements
with Einstein's predictions.
(audience applauding)
Look, I remember very vividly
when I saw the first picture,
and it was a humbling experience.
I didn't know whether to scream, happy,
or to feel, you know, the weight of the moment.
To obtain such an image,
astronomers understand one principle: bigger is better.
The bigger a telescope is,
the better the resolution of its pictures.
When it was new, the 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson
was the largest telescope in the world.
Using this instrument in 1929,
astronomers discovered the universe expanding.
By using the new 200-inch telescope at Palomar in 1963,
they discovered the brightest objects
in the universe: quasars.
Each increase in telescope size
yields a leap in our understanding of the universe.
Radio astronomy works the same way.
Radio is a form of light,
so the size of the radio dish matters.
Among the largest is in Puerto Rico.
The primary dish is 305 meters in diameter,
over a thousand feet across.
But radio astronomers have learned a trick.
At the Very Large Array in New Mexico,
they have 27 dish antennae, each 25 meters across,
arrayed in a Y-shape configuration.
Using a technique called interferometry,
these antennae work together, as a single instrument,
with a collecting area over 22-miles wide.
This collection of dishes gives the telescope
resolving power far beyond any individual dish.
But, astronomers wanted more.
Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, better known as the EHT.
Using the interferometry technique,
perfected by Very Large Array,
the EHT is made of radio telescopes
working in concert, all over the Earth.
This is possible because of one powerful feature.
Interferometry doesn't care
how far the antenna dishes are separated,
as long as they're precisely synchronized.
The combined antennae work
as though they're a single telescope,
with a collecting surface
as big as the distance between them.
With antennae located in Hawaii, North and South America,
Greenland, Europe, and the South Pole,
the EHT has a collecting surface
literally the size of the Earth,
and it gives the EHT the resolving power
to do the unthinkable: to see the supermassive black hole
in the heart of the M87 galaxy.
Black holes were mathematical curiosities.
There were solutions
to Einstein's theory of general relativity,
and for the longest time, for decades,
people did not think that they were real objects.
What the Event Horizon Telescope has allowed us to do
is go and look there for the very first time,
with the resolution to see the black hole.
The implications
of this new photo are enormous.
Relativity is no longer a theory, it is a fact.
Today, general relativity has passed another crucial test.
The shadow exists, and the inferred mass matches estimates
to the dynamics of stars 100,000 times farther away.
The object at the heart of M87,
the object that powers M87's jets, is a black hole,
like those described by general relativity.
Today, science fiction has become science fact.
Computer simulations
that mimicked what the EHT might see were promising.
They showed a well-defined shadow region.
This is the Event Horizon itself.
The boundary wall, where anything can enter,
but nothing can leave.
Astronomers believe that a process called spaghettification
occurs around the black hole.
An object falling toward the center of the hole
feels the power of gravity rising so fast,
it becomes torqued and stretched into strands,
like spaghetti.
No physical object can survive this process.
At the center of the hole is the singularity.
It is an object compressed and squeezed into a single point.
It has no dimensions left to it;
no height, length, nor depth.
It's an object where the physical realm,
and the laws of physics as we know them, have broken down.
And yet, it retains the gravity of all the mass
of every object it has ever devoured.
So, this is an easy way to visualize
how a black hole shadow is formed.
We can start by looking at what happens to light
when we have just flat space.
And as our normal experience is,
light just follows straight paths.
But if I put a black hole in the middle,
the black hole will warp the space time
all the way to the singularity.
It takes light rays and bends them,
and some of them actually go straight down
the neck of the singularity.
A shadow is what a black hole casts
on its surrounding emission,
so as gas gets close to the black hole,
it heats up, it emits light.
The black hole space time,
with the presence of the horizon,
and the with the presence
of a density depression at the center,
absorbs all the light there,
so it leaves a central darkness, which we call the shadow,
that the black hole imprints on the image.
Black holes come in sizes,
ranging from nanoscale to thousands of times larger
than our entire solar system.
The diameter of M87 is roughly 24 billion miles across.
Black holes are major disrupters of the cosmic order
on the largest scales in the universe.
M87's huge black hole mass makes it really a monster,
even by supermassive black hole standards,
so you're basically looking at a supermassive black hole
that's almost the size of our entire solar system.
Monster black holes, like M87,
are large because they're old.
It's likely that such objects are primordial, that is,
they formed just after the birth of the universe itself.
The quasars first observed in the 1960s at Palomar
are believed to be supermassive black holes.
They grow so fast, their gravitational power rises,
allowing them to feed on more and more.
Previous apex that it was feasting on something.
There must have been a lot more stars and gas
that were just feeding it.
M87 grew to be billions of solar masses.
Nothing is safe.
Matter rushes into the hole so fast, and at such a volume,
that a traffic jam builds up around them.
A disc backs up and some of the material is trapped
in tangled magnetic field lines surrounding the hole.
This material escapes along the magnetic pole
of the black hole and create gargantuan torches,
lighting up the intergalactic night.
Historically, scientists have relied on artists
to help them visualize the shape and nature of black holes,
but we'll no longer have to depend
on the guesswork of their creativity.
Yeah, I mean, there's always going to be
stuff we can't resolve directly,
and the artist conception
of whatever other phenomena is going to be valuable.
Above all, this monumental picture,
and the Earth Horizon Telescope itself,
serve as yet another example
of the genius of the human mind,
and the power of its curiosity,
to probe and understand the universe.
And this image forges a clear link now,
between supermassive black holes
and the engines of bright galaxies.
We now know, clearly, that black holes drive
large-scale structure in the universe
from their home in these galaxies.
And we now have an entirely new way of studying
general relativity of black holes that we never had before.
And as with all great discoveries,
this is just the beginning.
(gentle orchestral music)