About 20 years ago when
the existence of black holes was just being accepted,
a lot of us asked the very simple question,
What would it look like
if we could take a picture of a black hole?
It's not about what you see, but what you don't see.
[News] On Wednesday, scientists unveiled the first direct
visual evidence of a black hole. [Scientist] In April of 2017,
All the dishes in the Event Horizon Telescope swiveled,
turned and stared at a galaxy 55 million light years away.
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.
Here it is.
I was stunned
by how fascinated people were with the black hole.
The day after the announcement,
the picture was in the front page
of every single newspaper anywhere in the world.
I mean, we knew it was a good result,
but it was amazing to see how the world reacted to it.
Unlikely as it sounds,
we now
have an image of that invisible space anomaly, a black hole.
This is amazing.
The first picture ever of a black hole.
We now know clearly that
black holes drive large scale structure in the universe,
and we now have an entirely new way of studying
general relativity in black holes that we never had before.
And as with all great discoveries,
this is just the beginning.
So of course our experiment isn't done.
Once that initial excitement died down, we went right back
to the drawing board and we said, okay,
we have more data in our hands from that observing campaign.
We have this other black hole.
We've been working very hard at it
and hopefully will be able to share the results soon. But
very much along the lines of what is inferred for M87
and Sag A star... A black hole is a warping
in space time that is so strong that not even light
can escape from it.
And you can go quite close to black holes.
But if you cross that virtual surface
that we call the event horizon,
then you'll never be able to come out from it.
It's a place in the universe where our ideas
of how the smallest things work with quantum mechanics
and how the largest things work with gravity and Einstein's
theory of general relativity
get married to one another, like they both play a role
in the event
horizon of a black hole.
So when we asked ourselves which are the best black holes
to take a picture of, only two of them crossed the limit.
One of them is the black hole in the center of our galaxy
because it's the closest
and the other is the biggest black hole.
And that is the black hole in the center
of the M87 galaxy.
M87 is so slow that it stays still for us.
This is why we started with the M87 Galaxy
and we moved later on to
the black hole in the center of our own
galaxy.
The Event Horizon Telescope is an international collaboration.
Just by virtue of how we conduct this experiment,
we need telescopes all across the globe.
In fact,
what we really did was get telescopes from on different
continents to work in unison as if they were one telescope.
It is centered here at the University of Arizona.
We are the PI institution and we actually held
the first meeting of the event horizon here in Tucson.
We hosted the meeting.
We made possible three of the nine telescopes
of the Event Horizon Telescope, two of them here in Arizona,
one on top of KITT Peak and on top of Mount Graham
and the telescope in the South Pole.
When I got a job when I was 15,
it wasn't to buy a car, but it was to buy a telescope.
You know, I have been interested in this for a long time.
Going to a telescope is
perhaps a little bit like going to a monastery.
You're locked in a space
with nothing to do except for your work.
The first part of my work in this
project is making it possible to do the observations.
And currently, I'm responsible for making
the two observatories in Arizona
and the one at the South Pole work each year.
Things we have to worry about
that are a little bit
surprising are things like
the temperature of the cables that carry our signals
and how they change during our observation,
or the little quartz crystals that do
the oscillations that we use to
reference are our measurements to.
You've always got to be checking something.
It's like if you're driving and you had,
you know, 50 mirrors that you had to be checking all the time,
it's a lot of little things, but if you get any of them
wrong, then it doesn't work.
The SMT is a little unusual because when the telescope
turns, the building rotates with it.
It's gradual enough that you generally don't
notice it unless you can see out
a window.
A neat thing about being at the telescopes
is that there's no better place to just sit
and look at the stars the way I did when I was a kid.
If you were to ask someone,
imagine the strangest thing that must exist in the universe.
There's no way they would imagine
that there's a point in space where all the laws break down.
And so determining whether that's a real thing
in the universe and proving it, that seems really cool.
So I'm really happy to have the chance to be a part of that.
Einstein told us how to interpret
the world in a way that is very counterintuitive.
The equations of Einstein's theory are very complex,
and the only way to make any progress
is to throw them on big, super massive computers.
And calculate what they predict.
So what we do is we make a virtual black hole.
We calculate the motion of the plasma and the motion of light
coming out of it.
And then we simulate the observations,
just like the real observations happen.
We actually have a little machine
that we control our simulations with our hands
while the simulation is running in real time.
And now we're at the point where our tools here
at the University of Arizona are so efficient
that we can actually render a single simulated image
in a fraction of a second.
We have spent the last year and a half finessing our tools,
given what we know from the previous models.
And we are very, very eager to see
what this second black hole picture will look like.
Is it the same is a different
degree with Einstein's theory, does it not?
University of Arizona have just announced
new information about the center of our galaxy.
Literally just it just announced what they're calling
a very groundbreaking discovery and very cool stuff
here, Nicole.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here.
While we share with you our exciting new results
about our galaxy, the Milky Way
at its heart towards the Constellation
Sagittarius is Sagittarius A star,
the supermassive black hole suspected to reside there.
The Event Horizon Telescope is delighted to share with you
the first direct image
of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.
Sagittarius A star.
There is a reason why we say seeing is believing.
When you see something that you've heard so much about,
it suddenly becomes real.
And the black hole that we took a picture of
is not imagination anymore.
It's something as real as our own.
The thing that has drawn me
to black holes is this test of
theories of physics, theories of the universe.
And I really hope that my career and all the things
that I worked on and contributed to actually ends up,
you know, furthering that.
The release of Sag A star
brings us to the end of that top level goal
But the amazing thing is that the data we've taken
since the very first experiment has gotten so much better
that astrophysically,
We're going to learn a lot more
from everything we do after
than we did from just these first 2 pictures.
As humankind.
I think we do a lot of things
because we are intrinsically curious.
We have a sense of wonder about the things around us.
The story of the Black Hole just is a chapter in that book.