For the first time,
we've taken an image
of the supermassive black hole
in the heart of our galaxy.
This is a monumental thing
for humanity, really.
Sagittarius A* is a black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun
and devours almost everything
that comes close to it.
And yet before this photo,
we didn't even have direct proof that it definitely existed.
This is Ziri.
He took the photo.
OK, so...
him and around 350 other scientists.
But when you're around him,
maybe don't call it a photo.
Strictly speaking, no, it isn't a photo.
It's an image.
And yeah, it's blurry.
Especially because you're probably used to seeing black holes look like
this or this
or this.
But those are just computer animations,
whereas this is the first genuine image ever captured
of our own supermassive black hole,
something that once would have been considered impossible.
It's a black hole.
It's really far away, and it traps light.
It's meant to be invisible.
And inside of it, nothing can escape.
So it's kind of like a gateway into another part of our universe,
which we can never see into.
You're trying to take a picture of something
which literally swallows light,
and so you can't see that object directly.
You have to infer its presence by looking at the matter
which is swirling around that black hole.
So Sagittarius A* is over 26,000 light years away.
So trying to take a picture is equivalent to trying to resolve
with your naked eye
an orange on the surface of the moon.
Or I could put it another way,
it's like trying to see individual atoms in your own finger.
Really difficult.
You need a telescope.
You need a really big telescope.
You’d need a telescope with a dish the size of the Earth itself.
Now, obviously, that's not so practical.
But the Event Horizon Team had a solution,
thanks to one very cool thing.
By synchronising eight radio telescope arrays around the world
at the exact same time,
they essentially created one giant telescope
with each dish capturing a portion of the image
and then like a puzzle, piecing it together afterwards.
We needed a lot of things to go right to get this image.
We needed really good weather conditions
at every telescope around the world.
We needed people on call,
we needed atomic clocks, which sync the data to be working properly.
Some of these factors we can control,
some of these factors, like the weather, we can't.
But we were very fortunate in April 2017 that they all did
and that we were able to record this image.
Interviewer: OK, so... it's 2022...
Yep.
Interviewer: What took so long?
Well, there is a very simple answer and reason for that.
It's because it was really hard!
We don't have an unobscured field of view,
and what we're doing in trying to take this image
is look through this crowding,
look through all of this blurry, varying material.
That took time. It took a lot of effort.
Interviewer: It’s like the ultimate image touch-up?
Not allowed to say that!
So for the last five years, the team have been cleaning up
this galactic noise
to get this groundbreaking image of a black hole.
Except by the time they were done,
it actually looked more like
this.
Yes, so the data that we recorded is radio waves
and there is no colour to those.
You just have intensity.
So you have bright and you have dark.
So why is it red?
We chose that colour.
It could have been green.
It could have been blue.
It could have been literally anything.
We ended up going for this orangey-red palette
because we felt it conveyed a sense of how hot
and powerful and dramatic
this event that we're witnessing for the first time really is.
We're not paid to do this.
The collaboration is, for the most part,
a community effort of scientists
and who are just genuinely passionate about this.
It's such an exciting opportunity.
This is really quite a monumental thing
for humanity, really,
to be able to take a picture of the cosmic abyss,
of the edge of space and time,
literally.