Section:GDN 1N PaGe:3 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 17:58 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
3Friday 6 September 2019 The Guardian •
News
‘It’s just the start’: team behind fi rst image
of black hole wins biggest prize in physics
Ian Sample
Science editor
An international collaboration that
captured the fi rst image of a black hole,
a cosmic plughole from which nothing
that enters can ever escape, has won
the most lucrative prize in physics.
Hundreds of researchers on the
Event Horizon Telescope team will
share the $3m (£2.5m) Breakthrough
prize in fundamental physics for their
image of the monster black hole at the
heart of Messier 87 , a galaxy 55m light
years from Earth.
The remarkable shot of one of the
most mysterious types of object in
the universe required astronomers
to coordinate observations from
eight telescopes on four continents
from Antarctica to Arizona to create
an Earth-sized instrument sensitive
enough to spot a bagel on the moon.
The picture’s unveiling in April
marked the moment that scientists
saw what was once considered unsee-
able: the bottomless wells of gravity
that Albert Einstein loathed even as his
general theory of relativity predicted
their existence.
“We’ve known for a long time that
this was an amazing scientifi c result,
an amazing result for astronomy, butto get the recognition on the world
stage with a prize like this is vindi-
cation of all the hard work, all the
sacrifi ce by the team,” said Shep Doele-
man, the director of the EHT project
at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics. The 347 members
of the team will each receive about
$8,600 (£7,000).
The prize is the latest in what has
become an annual fl urry of awards
from the Breakthrough Foundation,
an organisation sponsored by Sili-
con Valley billionaires including the
investor Yuri Milner and Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg. Last month, three
theoretical physicists won the $3mSpecial Breakthrough prize in funda-
mental physics for marrying Einstein’s
description of gravity with quantum
mechanics in a speculative theory
called supergravity.
The Messier 87 photograph gave
scientists their fi rst glimpse of the
ring of dust and gas that hurtles at
near the speed of light around a black
hole before it plunges into the abyss.The ring encloses the round silhou-
ette of the black hole’s event horizon- the point of no return , after which
the gravitational pull is so intense that
not even light can escape. “This is only
the beginning,” said Doeleman. “We’re
launching into a new era of precision
imaging of black holes.”
The EHT team is working on an
image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole
at the centre of our home galaxy, the
Milky Way. Unlike Messier 87’s super-
massive black hole, which is 6.5 bn
times more massive than the sun, the
black hole at the centre of the Milky
Way is a mere 4 m times as massive.
Matter and light lap the smaller black
hole faster and its appearance in the
sky changes minute by minute, mak-
ing it a tougher beast to photograph.
The next major goal is to record
video of black holes, a feat that may
require the use of orbiting telescopes
that capture rapid sequences of
images. Footage of black holes will
help scientists uncover how they con-
sume what falls inside , how intense
fi elds around them propel jets of sub-
atomic particles into space, and how
black holes can shine brighter than all
the stars in their galaxy combined.
“Prizes like this acknowledge the
deep, meaningful tradition of learn-
ing, of us wanting to understand our
place in the cosmos,” said Doele-
man. “It makes us stop for a moment,
frankly. It gives us a moment to stop
and appreciate that the universe is an
amazing place.”
In an announcement yesterday,
six other researchers were named as
Breakthrough prize winners for their
work in the life sciences and mathe-
matics. Among them are David Julius
at the University of California , San
Francisco, who discovered mech-
anisms of pain sensation ; and Alex
Eskin at the University of Chicago, who
proved a mathematical proposition
called the “ magic wand theorem” with
Maryam Mirzakhani , the fi rst woman
to win the prestigious Fields Medal ,
who died aged 40 in 2017.
▼ The Event Horizon Telescope
image of a black hole in the galaxy
M87; right, scientist Shep Doeleman
PHOTOGRAPH: EHT/BARCROFT IMAGES55m
The distance in light years from the
Earth to the mysterious black hole
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