4 things we’ll learn from the first closeup image of a black hole
Event Horizon Telescope data are giving scientists an image of the Milky Way’s behemoth
BY LISA GROSSMAN 9:58AM, MARCH 29, 2019

FIRST LOOK The first image from the Event Horizon Telescope may show that the black hole at the center of our galaxy looks something like this simulation.

BRONZWAER, DAVELAAR, MOSCIBRODZKA AND FALCKE/RADBOUD UNIVERSITY

We’re about to see the first close-up of a black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87 (SN Online: 4/5/17).

In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes’ event horizons, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light can’t escape (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April.

Here’s what scientists hope those images can tell us.

What does a black hole really look like?
Black holes live up to their names: The great gravitational beasts emit no light in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so they themselves don’t look like much.

But astronomers know the objects are there because of a black hole’s entourage. As a black hole’s gravity pulls in gas and dust, matter settles into an orbiting disk, with atoms jostling one another at extreme speeds. All that activity heats the matter white-hot, so it emits X-rays and other high-energy radiation. The most voraciously feeding black holes in the universe have disks that outshine all the stars in their galaxies (SN Online: 3/16/18).

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/event-horizon-telescope-first-image-black-hole-questions