The EHT made big headlines then, and it’s continued working ever since, checking out black holes in multiple observation campaigns. More than half a year later, in April 2019, the rest of us did too. He finished his beer, alone with his team’s secret: he and a select group of other scientists had seen something previously unseeable. “I couldn’t tell anyone, but I had a nice, relaxing rest of that week,” he says. And there, in his cabin, Marrone saw the EHT’s first fruits, which would not be revealed to the public till the next year, when the team would be confident that its results would hold up to scientific scrutiny. He and colleagues had cleverly strung eight telescopes together-from California to Chile, from Greenland to the South Pole, and from France to Arizona-linking them in such a way that they acted like a single observatory the size of the globe. Now this one, at least, was a thing.Īnd it was a thing made possible by a project Marrone had worked on since it started in 2009, called the Event Horizon Telescope. For so long, black holes had been math and inference. The middle of the doughnut was the literal shadow of a literal black hole the glazed torus showed light bending and whipping around in the hole’s intense gravity. Which wasn’t very impressive: it resembled a doughnut, glazed shinier on one side than the other, that had been set atop a black party napkin and photographed fuzzily.īut Marrone found it beautifully concrete. The black hole looked like a black hole should. After their jubilation subsided, Marrone was, as much as anything, relieved. When the shot of M87’s core finally appeared as pixels on Marrone’s screen, he and his fellow team members celebrated. Scientists like Marrone cannot peer inside the infinitely dense depths of black holes, which remain experientially unknowable, but they can look at the light immediately outside those disks of darkness, in the area where a black hole becomes black-a terrifying place called the event horizon. They’re at the centers of most galaxies, which makes them fairly common (astronomers don’t know precisely how many galaxies exist in the universe, but data from the New Horizons spacecraft indicates there are hundreds of billions out there), yet no one had yet produced a picture of one. Supermassive black holes like M87’s, which is more than 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, are the universe’s most extreme objects, with matter crushed together into such a small space that even light can’t escape the great gravity. This article appears in Issue 23 of Alta Journal. Marrone, a professor at the University of Arizona, sat back with a vacation beer and prepared for the show-and-tell of the black hole at the center of a galaxy named M87. Members of his scientific team were going to reveal a picture they’d worked for years to get: the first-ever portrait of a black hole, very up close and extremely personal. While his family was lake swimming, he logged on to his computer and waited for the big meeting to start. Dan Marrone, a University of Arizona astronomy professor, led the Event Horizon Telescope team’s effort to capture the first image of a black hole.ĭan Marrone was alone in a Minnesota cabin one afternoon five summers ago.
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