Black holes’ photos will blow our minds again this year

The seemingly impossible, paradoxical news that astronomers had taken a picture of a supermassive black hole captured our imaginations in 2019 for good reason. What they actually showed us was a sort of shadow — a spherical blackness surrounded by a cosmic hurricane of matter and energy — but that was enough to qualify as a sign of real human progress.
And so the April announcement rose above other, less hopeful science-related news in 2019 — global warming, plastic overload, disinformation, drug overdoses and unaffordable medicine. Science, Nature and Science News all flagged the photo of the supermassive black hole — weighing an estimated 6.5 billion suns — as breakthrough of the year.
Getting that now-iconic image relied on technology that did not exist at the turn of the millennium. The leaders of the project said they counted on Moore’s Law to bring the electronic advances they needed. The image was constructed from radio waves picked up at eight far-flung telescopes — from France to Hawaii to the South Pole.
And it was just the beginning. Insiders now say they are on the verge of announcing a second image from this array, which is collectively called the Event Horizon Telescope. In 2020, we will get an image of the supermassive black hole known to be lurking at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.
The black hole image from 2019 is located in a distant galaxy, called M87, and while our black hole is much closer, it is also a factor of 1,000 smaller. In subsequent months and years, the team plans to create sharper, more accurate, less noisy images. They call these early shots rough cuts.
Despite all the bright stuff surrounding black holes, it’s impossible for any single existing or planned telescope to see that central shadow because it’s tiny on a cosmic scale.
The bigger a telescope’s mirror, the smaller the objects it can resolve, and to see that distant donut would require a mirror about the size of Earth. But there’s a trick, by which astronomers can coordinate an array of telescopes so that they act as pieces of one big telescope. That’s why it makes sense to call this disparate array the Event Horizon Telescope.
By the 1990s, astronomers had proved that black holes existed in the real universe. They did it by observing stars whipping around invisible companions – the motion suggesting an unseen mass too big to be any sort of ordinary matter.
We should get more information from the James Webb Space Telescope, which promises to see out in space to the cosmic dawn when the very first stars and galaxies were taking shape. It will also promise to extract all sorts of information about planets orbiting other stars, including which ones have atmospheres with water vapour, methane, carbon dioxide or oxygen and are therefore most likely to be harbouring life.
The good news is that the so much is within the reach of 21st century technology. The bad news is the telescope, like so many ambitious projects, is billions over budget, and years behind schedule. No matter how advanced we humans become, some things never change.
—Bloomberg