The Event Hori-
zon Telescope
drew on the work
of hundreds
of scientists at
more than 75
institutions all
over the world.
Some of the
project’s leaders,
left to right, top
to bottom, Shep
Doeleman, Mi-
chael Johnson,
Sandra Busta-
mante, Jona-
than Weintroub,
James Moran;
Feryal Ozel, Jo-
seph Farah, Neil
Erickson, Peter
Galison, Katie
Bouman; Nimesh
Patel, Alexander
Raymond, Kaz-
inori Akiyama,
Vernon Fath,
Mark Gurwell.The experiment
was so precise
that scientists
used atomic
clocks to sync
radio telescopes
on four conti-
nents. The result:
this historic view
of superheated
gas outlining a
black hole.
Th
zo
dr
of
of
m
ins
ov
So
pr
lef
to
Do
ch
Sa
m
th
Ja
Fe
se
Er
G
Bo
Pa
Ra
ino
Ve
MROM TIME TO TIME, a new picture of outer space
changes our understanding of the universe and
our place in it. One hundred years ago, astrono-
mers captured the light of stars behind the sun
during a total solar eclipse, proving that the sun
had bent the starlight and validating Albert Ein-
stein’s new theories of gravity. In 1923, Edwin
Hubble captured a pulsing star within the Andromeda Galaxy on a
glass photographic plate, revealing for the fi rst time that galaxies exist
beyond our own Milky Way. By the 1960s, astronomers in New Jersey
had detected radiation from the Big Bang, now called the Cosmic Mi-
crowave Background, marking the edge of the observable universe—
though they didn’t know what they were seeing at fi rst.
This past April, a picture of a black hole, captured by a global network of
telescopes, again transformed our perception of the cosmos. That image
appeared in major newspapers around the world: a ring of superheated
gas 55 million light-years away, about the width of our solar system, spi-
raling into an abyss with the mass of 6.5 billion suns at the center of the
giant galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The picture again validated the physics of