Dennis Overbye

<h1>Gov. David Ige of Hawaii announced Wednesday that construction will begin next week on a giant telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, the volcano that looms over the Big Island of Hawaii.</h1>

The announcement was widely expected after a series of court rulings in recent years had gone the embattled telescope’s way. “We have followed a 10-year process to get to this point,” Ige said.

He was flanked at a news conference by Henry Yang, chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and chair of the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory. “We have learned much about the unique importance of Mauna Kea to all,” Yang said. “Hawaii is a very special place that has long honored the arts of astronomy and navigation.”

He added, “We would like to acknowledge those who disagree with this project and their right to voice their disagreement.”

The Thirty Meter Telescope will be the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, with a primary mirror bigger than a basketball court, and one of the most expensive: According to knowledgeable, unaffiliated astronomers, its costs could reach $2 billion.

But the project has been plagued with controversy and a series of legal and illegal obstacles. Activists have opposed it, saying that decades of telescope-building on Mauna Kea have polluted the mountain. In 2014, protesters disrupted a groundbreaking ceremony and blocked construction vehicles from mountain roads.

Mauna Kea is considered “ceded land” that once belonged to the Hawaiian kingdom and is now held in trust for Native Hawaiians. Some of them have contended that the construction of telescopes on the mountain’s summit — 13 so far — has interfered with cultural and religious practices. For others, the telescope project has become a symbol of Western colonization.

A poll last year by The Honolulu Star-Advertiser found that 72% of Native Hawaiians supported the telescope and that 15% opposed it. The general support, they say, is befitting the heritage of a people who traditionally navigated the Pacific by the winds, tides and stars. Many say they hope the telescope will bring technological and economic development to the island.

The telescope would be built by an international collaboration called the TMT International Observatory, led by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology but also including Japan, China, India and Canada.

This week a coalition of activists led by Kealoha Pisciotta filed a legal challenge in the 3rd Circuit Court of Hawaii, seeking an injunction against the telescope construction. The TMT International Observatory, the activists said, had failed to post a security bond that is required under a 1977 plan that governs the management of the mountain. The bond, in the amount of the full cost of the project, would cover the cost of restoring the site to its natural state once the telescope has finished its mission.

“By failing to post the bond, they have laid all financial liability on the People of Hawai’i, in the event the TMT doesn’t get full funding,” Pisciotta said in an email. “And this is especially important because they don’t have full funding now.”

In an email, Douglas Ing, a lawyer for the observatory, said: “We had a brief opportunity to review an unfiled copy of a lawsuit. We believe this is a weak lawsuit, and we expect to defeat it.”

It is only the latest chapter in a long series of protests and legal skirmishes. In December 2015, the state’s Supreme Court invalidated a previous construction permit on the grounds that the project’s opponents had been deprived of due process. A state board had granted the permit before the opponents could be heard in a so-called contested case hearing.

The TMT astronomers said they would build their telescope in the Canary Islands if denied in Hawaii. In October, the Hawaiian Supreme Court restored the telescope’s building permit. This summer, Ige announced that a “notice to proceed” had been issued, allowing construction. As part of the deal, five telescopes operating on Mauna Kea will be shut down and their sites restored to original condition.

Ige said the environmental reviews required for the decommissioning of two of those telescopes had already begun.

Yang said that it would take 10 years to actually build the telescope but that he did not know an estimate of the total cost. He stressed that the partners in the international collaboration were committed to finishing the project.

The Mauna Kea access road that goes up to the summit, which was the scene of protests and blockades last time around, will be severely restricted starting Monday, Ige said.

“We are asking people to be safe,” he said. “We ask they be respectful of those who work on this project.”

He added, “We are being respectful of those who choose to voice their disagreement with this project.”

He said he was working with the mayor of Hawaii County, Harry Kim, “to achieve a broader vision of Mauna Kea as symbol of peace and international collaboration.”

“I believe we can find a new way forward,” Ige said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/hawaii-telescope-tmt-mauna-kea.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Hawaii Telescope Project, Long Disputed, Will Begin Construction

The announcement was widely expected after a series of court rulings in recent years had gone the embattled telescope’s way. “We have followed a 10-year process to get to this point,” Ige said.

Hawaii telescope project, long disputed, will begin construction

Such an announcement has been anxiously awaited both by astronomers and by Hawaiian cultural activists since last year, when Hawaii’s Supreme Court restored the telescope’s building permit. As part of the deal, five telescopes operating on Mauna Kea will be shut down and their sites restored to their original condition.

“We are all stewards of Mauna Kea,” Ige said. He pledged to respect the rights and cultural traditions of the Hawaiian people, including the freedom to speak out against the telescope.

He asked that further debate happen away from the mountain, where steep roads and limited water, oxygen and medical services pose a safety risk. As he spoke, arguments were already breaking out on Twitter and Facebook.

“This decision of the Hawaiian Supreme Court is the law of the land, and it should be respected,” he said.

The announcement was another skirmish, surely not the last, for control of the volcano’s petrified lava slopes and the sky overhead.

The Thirty Meter Telescope would be the largest in the Northern Hemisphere. Hawaiian activists have long opposed it, contending that decades of telescope-building on Mauna Kea have polluted the mountain. In 2014, protesters disrupted a groundbreaking ceremony and blocked work vehicles from accessing the mountain.

Mauna Kea is considered “ceded land” held in trust for Hawaiian people, and some Hawaiians have argued that the spate of telescope construction atop the mountain has interfered with cultural and religious practices.

The Thirty Meter Telescope would be built by an international collaboration called the TMT International Observatory. The project, which involves the University of California and the California Institute of Technology as well as Japan, China, India and Canada, is expected to cost $2 billion.

In December of 2015, the state’s Supreme Court invalidated a previous construction permit, on the grounds that the opponents had been deprived of due process because a state board had granted the permit before the opponents could be heard in a contested case hearing. The court awarded a new permit last year.

At the time, astronomers with the project said they would build the telescope in the Canary Islands if denied in Hawaii.

On Wednesday night, in a precursor to Thursday’s announcement, state authorities dismantled an assortment of structures that had been constructed on Mauna Kea by protesters.

The structures included a pair of shacks called “hales,” one located across from a visitor center halfway up the mountain, where protests had been staged, and another at the base of the mountain that activists were using as a checkpoint.

Also dismantled were two small stone monuments, or “ahus” — one on the road leading to the telescope site, the other in the middle of the site, according to a spokesman for the TMT project. They were built only recently, without a permit, and so were deemed by the court to have no historical value.

But Kealoha Pisciotta, a leader of the opposition, called the dismantling a “desecration” and “a hostile and racist act,” in an email. “They call these Religious structures illegal structures but our rights are constitutionally protected and the right specifically protected is our right to ‘continue’ our practice,” she wrote.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/science/telescope-mauna-kea-hawaii.html" id="43dd6706-1b9e-37f8-adb0-ea8c8a457c94">The New York Times</a>.

In Hawaii, Construction to Begin on Disputed Telescope Project

Gov. David Ige of Hawaii announced on Thursday that a “notice to proceed” had been issued for construction of a giant, long-contested telescope on Mauna Kea, the volcano on the Big Island that 13 major telescopes already call home. Construction could start as soon as July.

In Hawaii, construction to begin on disputed telescope project

For years, and for all the mounting scientific evidence, black holes have remained marooned in the imaginations of artists and the algorithms of splashy computer models of the kind used in Christopher Nolan’s outer-space epic “Interstellar.” Now they are more real than ever.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of a galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the implacable power of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to Messier 87, or M87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo. There, a black hole several billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet of energy some 5,000 light-years into space.

The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it. If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap. Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish like a dream.

On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. As far as the team of astronomers could ascertain, the shape of the shadow is circular, as Einstein’s theory predicts.

The results were announced simultaneously at news conferences in Washington and five other places around the world, befitting an international collaboration involving 200 members, nine telescopes and six papers for the Astrophysical Journal Letters. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out in the room and throughout a universe of astrofans following the live-streamed event.

Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale, said that Einstein would be delighted. “His theory has just been stress-tested under conditions of extreme gravity, and looks to have held up.”

Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, and who shared a Nobel Prize in 2017 for the discovery of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, wrote in an email: “It is wonderful to see the nearly circular shadow of the black hole. There can be no doubt this really is a black hole at the center of M87, with no signs of deviations from general relativity.”

Janna Levin, a cosmologist and professor at Barnard College in New York, said, “What a time to be alive.”

A telescope the size of Earth

The image emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. In all, eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the galaxy in Virgo on and off for 10 days in April 2017.

The telescope array also monitored a dim source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. There, 26,000 light-years from Earth, and cloaked in interstellar dust and gas, lurks another black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million suns.

The network is named after the edge of a black hole, the point of no return; beyond the event horizon, not even light can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull.

The mystery of black holes has tantalized astronomers for more than half a century. In the 1950s, astronomers with radio telescopes discovered that pearly, seemingly peaceful galaxies were spewing radio energy from their cores — far more energy than would be produced by the ordinary thermonuclear engines that make stars shine.

Perhaps, astrophysicists thought, the energy was being liberated by matter falling onto supermassive, dense objects — later called black holes. Since then, scientists have devised detailed models of how this would work. As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain, the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt out the side. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes can be the most luminous objects in the universe.

The images released Wednesday bolster the notion of violence perpetrated over cosmic scales, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Event Horizon team. “Black holes must be the most exotic major disrupters of cosmic order,” she said.

Einstein’s least favorite idea

The unveiling took place almost exactly a century after images of stars askew in the heavens made Einstein famous and confirmed his theory of general relativity as the law of the cosmos. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper.

General relativity led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl like a mix-master and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole.

To Einstein’s surprise, the equations indicated that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping matter and light in perpetuity. He disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes furiously consuming everything around them.

Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that burned up their fuel and collapsed. But others, hidden in the center of nearly every galaxy, are millions or billions of times more massive than the sun.

Nobody knows how such behemoths of nothingness could have been assembled. Dense wrinkles in the primordial energies of the Big Bang? Monster runaway stars that collapsed and swallowed up their surroundings in the dawning years of the universe?

Nor do scientists know what ultimately happens to whatever falls into a black hole, nor what forces reign at the center, where, theoretically, the density approaches infinity and smoke pours from nature’s computer.

Zeroing in on cosmic monsters

Any lingering doubts about the reality of black holes dissolved three years ago when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected the collision of a pair of distant black holes, which sent a shiver through the fabric of space-time.

Now the reality has a face. Peter Galison, a physicist, filmmaker and historian at Harvard, and a member of the Event Horizon team, noted that there is “a wonderful open-ended sense of being able to see something” instead of merely accumulating statistical evidence.

Still, questions about gravity and the universe abound. “We know there must be something more,” Avery Broderick, a physicist at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told the audience in Washington. “Black holes are one of the places to look for answers.”

Proving that the monsters in Virgo and the center of the Milky Way were really black holes required measuring the sizes of their shadows. That was no easy job. Both look exceedingly small from this distance, and resolving their tiny details would be a challenge for even the biggest individual telescope.

Moreover, the view is blurred by the charged particles such as electrons and protons that fill interstellar space. “It’s like looking through frosted glass,” said Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope.

To see into the shadows, astronomers needed to be able to tune their radio telescope to shorter wavelengths. And they needed a bigger telescope.

Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, the dream-child of Doeleman. By combining data from radio telescopes as far apart as the South Pole, France, Chile and Hawaii, using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, Doeleman and his colleagues created a telescope as big as Earth itself, with the power to resolve details as small as an orange on the lunar surface.

In April 2017, the network of eight telescopes, including the South Pole Telescope, synchronized by atomic clocks, stared at the two targets off and on for 10 days.

For two years, the Event Horizon team reduced and collated the results. The data were too voluminous to transmit over the internet, so they were placed on hard disks and flown back to MIT’s Haystack Observatory, in Westford, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

The data from the South Pole could not arrive before December 2017, Doeleman said in an interview, “because it was Antarctic winter, when nothing could go in or out.”

Last year the team divided into four groups to assemble images from the data dump. To stay objective and guard against bias, the teams had no contact with each other. They readied themselves for an inconclusive or ambiguous result — a blur, perhaps, that they couldn’t quite read.

‘It was a surprise how clear this image is’

Doeleman grew optimistic last year at a dinner attended by some of the younger members of the team, who showed him the first data for M87.

“There were clear signatures of a ringlike structure,” he said. After dinner, he went to his office and made some crude calculations. “That was one of those great moments,” he said. “It was a surprise how clear this image is.”

As matter swirls into a black hole, it accretes into a disk just outside the abyss’ edge. The ring of light in the new image corresponds to the innermost orbit of photons — the quantum particles that make up light. By laying a ruler across that ring, astronomers could measure the size of the black hole and see that it met Einstein’s prescription.

The measurement also gave a firm estimate of the mass of the Virgo black hole: 6.5 billion solar masses. That is heavier than most previous determinations, and it suggests that the masses of other big black holes may need to be revised upward.

The observations also revealed that the accretion disk — the doughnut of doom — is on its side with regard to Earth, the hole facing us and spinning clockwise. The image is brighter where gas flows around the hole, toward us.

Doeleman described the black hole in the center of the Milky Way as “a fascinating, interesting object.” But it is much smaller than the Virgo black hole, so its portrait is harder to capture. That task lies ahead for the Event Horizon Telescope.

The telescope network continues to grow. In April 2018, a telescope in Greenland was added to the collaboration. Another observation run was made of the Milky Way and M87, and captured twice the amount of data gathered in 2017. That data was not part of the results released Wednesday, but will be used to confirm them and monitor the behavior of the black holes. Two more antennas are waiting to join the Event Horizon Telescope.

“The plan is to carry out these observations indefinitely and see how things change,” said Doeleman, embarking on his new career as a tamer of extragalactic beasts.

“It’s astonishing to think humans can turn the Earth into a telescope and see a black hole,” and still more amazing to do it with this team, he said. “That’s the best.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b0df6181-615b-3d80-adde-93dfd324b5ac" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html">The New York Times</a>.

Peering Into Light's Graveyard: The First Image of a Black Hole

Astronomers announced Wednesday that at last they had captured an image of the unobservable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.

Peering into light's graveyard: The first image of a Black Hole

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the implacable power of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo. There, a black hole several billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet of energy some 5,000 light-years into space.

On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. As far as the Event Horizon team could ascertain, the shape of the shadow is circular, as Einstein’s theory predicts.

“Einstein must be totally chuffed,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale. “His theory has just been stress-tested under conditions of extreme gravity, and looks to have held up.”

Perhaps, astrophysicists thought, the energy was being liberated by matter falling onto supermassive, dense objects — later called black holes. Since then, scientists have devised detailed models of how this would work. As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain, the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt from either side. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes can be the most luminous objects in the universe.

Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that burned up their fuel and collapsed. But others, hidden in the centers of nearly every galaxy, are millions or billions of times more massive than the sun.

Still, questions about gravity and the universe abound. “We know there must be something more,” Broderick told the audience in Washington. “Black holes are one of the places to look for answers.”

Proving that the monsters in Virgo and the center of the Milky Way were really black holes required measuring the sizes of their shadows. That was no easy job. Both are exceedingly small, at this distance, and resolving their tiny details would be a challenge for even the biggest individual telescope.

The ring of light in the new image corresponds to the innermost orbit of photons — the quantum particles that comprise light — around the black hole. By laying a ruler across that ring, astronomers could measure the size of the black hole and see that it met Einstein’s prescription.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html" id="b0df6181-615b-3d80-adde-93dfd324b5ac">The New York Times</a>.

Darkness Visible, Finally: Astronomers Capture First Ever Image of a Black Hole

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loath to accept it. If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap, a black hole. Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish like a dream.

It would have been easy for the theory to come out wrong, said Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario: “In April 2017, this was the dog that did not bark.”

The results were announced simultaneously at news conferences in Washington, D.C., and five other places around the world, befitting an international collaboration involving 200 members, nine telescopes and six papers for the Astrophysical Journal Letters. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out in the room and throughout a universe of astrofans who were following the live-streamed event.

“Einstein must be totally chuffed,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale. “His theory has just been stress-tested under conditions of extreme gravity and looks to have held up.”

The telescope array also monitored a dim source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. There, 26,000 light-years from Earth, and buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, lurks another black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million suns.

The image provided astrophysicists with the first look at the innards of a black hole and a mystery that has tantalized astronomers for more than half a century.

In the 1950s, astronomers with radio telescopes discovered that pearly, seemingly peaceful galaxies were spewing radio energy from their cores — far more energy than would be produced by the ordinary thermonuclear engines that make stars shine. Quasars are the most extreme examples: distant, pointlike fountains of energy that outshine their source galaxies.

Perhaps, astrophysicists thought, the energy was being liberated by matter falling onto supermassive, dense objects — later called black holes. The process would generate energy the way water pouring over Niagara Falls generates sound and spray.

Since then, scientists have devised detailed models of how this would work. As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain, the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt from either side. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centers of galaxies, can be the most luminous objects in the universe.

The images released today bolster the notion of violence perpetrated over cosmic scales, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Event Horizon team. “Black holes must be the most exotic major disrupters of cosmic order,” she said.

The unveiling, before a crowd at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and five other venues around the world, took place almost exactly a century after images of stars askew in the heavens made Einstein famous and confirmed his theory of general relativity as the law of the cosmos. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper, and allows for the contents of the universe, including light rays, to follow curved paths.

To Einstein’s surprise, the equations indicated that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space-time could collapse, trapping matter and light in perpetuity.

Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes furiously consuming everything around them.

Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that burned up their fuel and collapsed. But others, crouching in the centers of nearly every galaxy, are millions or billions of times more massive than the sun.

Nor do scientists know what ultimately happens to whatever falls into a black hole, nor what forces reign at the center, where according to the math we know now the density approaches infinity and smoke pours from God’s computer.

Zeroing in on cosmic monsters

Any lingering doubts about the reality of black holes vanished three years ago when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected the collision of a pair of distant black holes, which sent a shiver through the fabric of space-time.

Still, mysteries abound about gravity and the universe. “We know there must be something more,” Broderick told the audience in Washington, D.C. “Black holes are one of the places to look for answers.”

Proving that the monsters in Virgo and the center of the Milky Way are really black holes required measuring the sizes of their shadows. But that was no easy job. In a cosmic coincidence, both of them would appear from Earth to be about as big as an orange on the moon. Resolving their tiny details would be a challenge for even the biggest single telescope to achieve.

Moreover, interstellar space is filled with charged particles such as electrons and protons; these scatter the radio waves emanating from a black hole into a blur that obscures details of the source. “It’s like looking through frosted glass,” said Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope.

To penetrate the haze and see deeper into the shadows of Virgo, astronomers needed to be able to tune their radio telescope to shorter wavelengths. And they needed a bigger telescope. The bigger the antenna, the higher the resolution, or magnification, it can achieve.

Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, named for a black hole’s point of no return; whatever crosses the event horizon falls into blackness everlasting. The telescope was the dream-child of Doeleman, who was inspired to study black holes by examining the mysterious activity in the centers of violent radio galaxies such as M87.

By combining data from radio telescopes as far apart as the South Pole, France, Chile and Hawaii, using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, Doeleman and his colleagues created a telescope as big as Earth itself, with the power to resolve details as small as an orange on the lunar surface.

It has taken a decade for the astronomers to learn how to use it, and to equip some antennas around the world to make observations that they were not built to make. In the end, Doeleman said, they had a telescope capable of reading the date on a quarter in Los Angeles from Washington, D.C.

For two years, the Event Horizon team reduced and collated the results from their 2017 observations. The data — 5 petabyes, equivalent to a lifetime of selfies taken by 40,000 people, said Doug Marrone of the University of Arizona — were too voluminous to transmit over the internet. So they had to be placed on hard disks and flown back to MIT’s Haystack Observatory, in Westford, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

Last year the team divided into four groups to assemble images from the data dump. To stay objective and guard against bias, the teams had no contact with each other.

After years of learning and disappointment, the team was prepared for an inconclusive or ambiguous result, a blur that perhaps they couldn’t quite read, Doeleman said.

The first time indication that this time would be different came last year at a dinner a year ago of the Black Hole Initiative, a Harvard-Smithsonian effort. Some of the younger members of the Event Horizon team were there, and they showed Doeleman the first data for M87. “There were clear signatures of a ringlike structure,” he said.

After dinner he went to his office and made some crude calculations. “That was one of those great moments,” he said. “It was a surprise how clear this image is.”

The ring of light in the new image corresponds to the innermost orbit of photons — the quantum particles that comprise light — around the black hole. Anything closer falls in and disappears. By laying a ruler across that ring, Doeleman said, astronomers could measure the size of the black hole and see that it met Einstein’s prescription.

The ring measurement also gave a firm estimate of the mass of the Virgo black hole: 6.5 billion solar masses. That is heavier than most previous determinations, which suggests that estimates of the masses of other big black holes also may need to be revised upward.

The observations also revealed that the accretion disk — the doughnut of doom — is on its side with regard to Earth, the hole facing us and spinning clockwise. One side of the image is brighter where a blowtorch of gas is aimed toward us; on the other, dimmer side the blowtorch is aimed away.

Doeleman described the black hole in the center of the Milky Way as “a fascinating, interesting object.” But because it is much smaller than the Virgo black hole, its portrait is harder to capture. That task lies ahead for the Event Horizon Telescope.

The telescope network continues to grow. In April 2018, a telescope in Greenland was added to the collaboration. Another observation run was made of the Milky Way and M87, and captured twice the amount of data gathered in 2017. That data was not part of the results released today, but will be used to confirm them and monitor the behavior of the black holes.

Meanwhile, two more antennas are waiting to join the Event Horizon Telescope.

Black Hole Image Revealed for First Time Ever

Astronomers announced Wednesday that at last they had observed the unobserveable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.

It would have been easy for the theory to come out wrong, said Avery Broderick of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario: “In April 2017 this was the dog that did not bark.”

The results were announced simultaneously at news conferences in Washington, D.C., and five other places around the world, befitting a collaboration involving 200 members and nine telescopes around the world. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out in the room and throughout a universe of astrofans who were following the live-streamed event.

“What a time to be alive,” said Janna Levin, a cosmologist and professor at Barnard College in New York.

Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes furiously consuming their surroundings.

Since then, other collisions have been recorded, and black holes have become so humdrum that astronomers no longer bother sending out news releases about them.

The proof that these objects are really black holes would be to find that the darkness at the heart of Virgo was smaller than the mathematical predictions for a black hole. But the more astronomers narrowed it down, the harder they had to work.

Interstellar space is filled with charged particles such as electrons and protons; these scatter the radio waves emanating from a black hole into a blur that obscures details of the source. “It’s like looking through frosted glass,” said Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope.

The network has gained antennas and sensitivity over the last decade. In the spring of 2015 an effort using seven telescopes took aim at the centers of the Milky Way and M87, but bad weather hampered the observations.

Two years later, in April 2017, the network of eight telescopes, including the South Pole Telescope, synchronized by atomic clocks, stared at the two targets off and on for 10 days.

It took the Event Horizon team two years to reduce and collate the results from their 2017 observations. The data were too voluminous to transmit over the internet, and so had to be placed on hard disks and flown back to MIT’s Haystack Observatory, in Westford, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

The data from the South Pole could not arrive before December 2017, Doeleman said, “because it was Antarctic winter, when nothing could go in or out.”

Last year the team divided into four groups to assemble images from the data dump. To stay objective and guard against bias, the teams had no contact with each other, Doeleman said.

In the meantime, the telescope kept growing. In April 2018, a telescope in Greenland was added to the collaboration. Another observation run was made of the Milky Way and M87, and captured twice the amount of data gathered in 2017.

“We’ve hitched our wagon to a bandwidth rocket,” Doeleman said last week. The new observations weren’t included in Wednesday’s reveal, but they will allow the astronomers to check the 2017 results and to track changes in the black holes as the years go by.

“The plan is to carry out these observations indefinitely,” said Doeleman, embarking on his new career as a tamer of extragalactic beasts, “and see how things change.”

Black Hole Picture Revealed for the First Time

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron.

As hot, dense gas swirls around the black hole, like water headed down a drain, the intense pressures and magnetic fields cause energy to squirt from either side. As a paradoxical result, supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centers of galaxies, can be the most luminous objects in the universe.

“We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron.

To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to a giant galaxy known as Messier 87, in the constellation Virgo. There, a black hole about 7 billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet of energy some 5,000 light years into space.

On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out.

The images provide astrophysicists with the first look at the innards of a black hole. The energy within is thought to be powerful enough to power quasars and other violent phenomena from the nuclei of galaxies, including the jets of intense radiation that spew 5,000 light years from the galaxy M87.

Astronomers announced Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

The telescope array also monitored a dim source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. There, 26,000 light-years from Earth, and buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, another black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million suns, almost certainly lurks.

For some years now, the scientific literature, news media and films such as “Interstellar” and the newly released “High Life” have featured remarkably sophisticated and highly academic computer simulations of black holes. But the real thing looked different. For starters, the black holes in movies typically are not surrounded by fiery accretion disks of swirling, doomed matter, as are the black holes in Virgo and Sagittarius.

Perhaps even more important, the images provide astrophysicists with the first look at the innards of a black hole. The energy within is thought to be powerful enough to power quasars and other violent phenomena from the nuclei of galaxies, including the jets of intense radiation that spew 5,000 light years from the galaxy M87.

Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes waiting for something to fall in.

Interstellar space is filled with charged particles such as electrons and protons; these scattered the radio waves emanating from the black hole into a blur that obscured details of the source. “It’s like looking through frosted glass,” said Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope.

At 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil their long-awaited pictures of what are believed to be two black holes.

One of the objects sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, and is equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that have otherwise disappeared from the visible universe.

The other is in the heart of Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo, where a black hole 7 billion times the mass of the sun is spewing a jet of energy thousands of light-years across space.

According to calculations, and if all has gone well, either or both of the black holes should appear as a tiny shadow backlit by the glow of radio energy at the galactic center.

They might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether they are rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing them are slightly wrong, or if they are spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe.

In such shadows the dreams of physicists die; time ends; space-time, matter and light disappear into the primordial nothing from which they spring; and the ghosts of Einstein and Hawking mingle with history and memory. For the first time, astronomers will be staring down the pipes of eternity

If, in fact, astronomers have finally brought the black holes into view at last. The Event Horizon team has been extremely tight-lipped. Nobody knows for certain if either of these black holes, if any, has been imaged.

Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope, was ebullient but guarded when reached last week at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “The team is working exceptionally hard to quadruple-check all the results,” he said.

But he and his colleagues are acting as if they have something to celebrate. The announcement of their results will take place simultaneously in six places around the world, reflecting the vast international nature of the collaboration. One news conference, at the National Press Club in Washington, will be presided over by France Córdova, head of the National Science Foundation. The team members and their friends have booked the National Air and Space Museum for a party that evening.

The unveiling will take place almost exactly a century after images of stars askew in the heavens made Einstein famous and confirmed his theory of general relativity as the law of the cosmos. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper, and allows for the contents of the universe, including light rays, to follow curved paths.

Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes waiting to vacuum up their surroundings. Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that have burned up their fuel and collapsed.

Any lingering doubts as to their existence vanished three years ago when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected the collision of a pair of distant black holes, which sent a shiver through the fabric of space-time.

Nonetheless, astronomers are thrilled at the prospect of finally, actually seeing the previously unseeable.

“Yes, I’m definitely excited to see the image!” Daniel Holz, of the University of Chicago, wrote in an email. “It’s not really rational, since I know the math works and the theory has been thoroughly tested. But still, this would be a picture of the real thing, up close and personal. That is super cool.”

Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astrophysicist who is not part of the project, said, “It’s exciting, even just technically, to get this up close and personal to a black hole.”

Especially when the black hole is no run-of-the-mill stellar corpse, but one of the behemoths that crouch in the centers of galaxies and direct cosmic weather, launching thunderbolts across thousands of light-years.

Even if the new images do not overthrow relativity, they will be invaluable as astronomers’ first glimpses into the hearts of these entities and the way they generate cosmically catastrophic energies.

The center of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from Earth, coincides with a faint source of radio noise called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star). By tracking the orbits of stars around this hub, astronomers have calculated that whatever sits at the center has the mass of 4 million suns.

But it emits no visible or infrared light. If this is not a black hole, no one knows what it could be. The only way to be sure is to peer through the haze and record the shadow of oblivion.

Which is no small job. According to the standard Einstein calculations, a black hole with the mass of 4.1 million suns would be only about 15 million miles wide — a tiny area to observe clearly from this distance. Luckily, the black hole’s gravity will magnify it to appear twice that size. But discerning even that is like trying to spot an orange on the Moon with the naked eye.

It takes a big telescope to see something so small. Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, named for a black hole’s point of no return. The telescope was the dream-child of Doeleman, who was inspired to study black holes by examining the mysterious activity in the centers of violent radio galaxies such as M87.

By combining data from radio telescopes as far apart as the South Pole, France, Chile and Hawaii, using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, Doeleman and his colleagues created a telescope as big as Earth itself.

The network has gained antennas and sensitivity over the last decade. In April 2017, the network of eight telescopes, synchronized by atomic clocks, stared at the Milky Way center and at M87 off and on for 10 days.

Astronomers have taken the last two years to reduce and collate the results. The data were too voluminous to transmit over the internet, and so had to be placed on hard disks and flown to MIT’s Haystack Observatory, in Westford, Massachusetts, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

Last year the team divided into four groups to assemble images from the data. To stay objective and guard against bias, the teams had no contact with each other, Doeleman said.

In the meantime, the telescope kept growing. In April 2018, a telescope in Greenland was added. Another observation run was made of the Milky Way and M87, and captured twice the amount of data gathered in 2017.

“We’ve hitched our wagon to a bandwidth rocket,” Doeleman said. The new observations won’t be included in Wednesday’s reveal, but they will allow the astronomers to check the 2017 results and to track changes in the black holes as the years go by.

Dennis Overbye

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