Lumpology Space Time Project:
First image of the event horizon of a black hole (2019)
The Event Horizon Telescope or EHT is an earth sized array of eight telescopes that in 2017 took the very first photo of the event horizon of a black hole.
Though the picture was taken in 2017 the data had to be taken to a super-computer to be processed because the data was taken on multiple arrays.
This delayed the images release till early 2019. A few common misconceptions about the first image taken by the EHT are:
First: It was not a direct picture of a black hole. Black holes are no larger the size of an atomic nucleus and at 55 million light-years away from earth there was no possible way for even the EHT to capture that.
Second: It was not an image of the event horizon in a direct sense.
No light that hits the event horizon of a black hole can escape.
Once past the event horizon, the gravity of the black hole is too powerful for the light to escape.
Therefore, the image we see is not actually of the event horizon but rather an image of the light around the event horizon.
Third: The image colour is not true colour.
The wavelength of colour that humans can see and interpret is in a spectrum called the visible spectrum and is microscopic in wavelength.
Because of this, and how far the black hole is from earth, the image had to be taken in the microwave spectrum.
The microwave spectrum is quite large in range as well, however in this instance the captured light waves were around the size of a dime.
What we actually see in the image is the scientific interpretation of the data that resembles models of what we expect a black hole to look like in the visible spectrum.
The image taken was of the central black hole in a galaxy called Messier 87, a galaxy that had been previously and is now confirmed to have an unusually large black hole in its centre.
The black hole in Messier 87 is predicted to encompass as much as 1 percent of the galaxy’s entire mass and the event horizon has been observed to be around 2 light days across.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/about
blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/04/10/event-horizon-telescope-image-black-hole-m87