Why secrecy? Because a leak, before we were confident in the image, would have allowed no second chance: a retracted image would shatter confidence in the whole enterprise. Public silence was necessary: we agreed to an absolutely strict embargo, not a word, and certainly not a preliminary picture to be shared with outside colleagues, even family. Still, the challenge of imaging is immense: not a pixel would exist without the combined efforts of telescope operators, instrument designers, theorists, data experts, and engineers, from early-career to senior scientists. Much bigger, supermassive black holes sit at the center of most every galaxy, including our own, the Milky Way, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of our sun.īut since black holes do not reflect light and do not emit light, how does one capture in a picture this shyest of all things? Happily for us imagers, black holes are surrounded by orbiting gases that glow with heat. Smallish black holes-the size of a modest city-can form when stars of the right size run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity.
Physically, black holes are regions of space where the inward pull of gravity is so powerful that nothing, no object, not even light, can escape.
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