Dan Marrone was alone in a Minnesota cabin one afternoon five summers ago. While his family was lake swimming, he logged on to his computer and waited for the big meeting to start. Members of his scientific team were going to reveal a picture they’d worked for years to get: the first-ever portrait of a black hole, very up close and extremely personal.
Marrone, a professor at the University of Arizona, sat back with a vacation beer and prepared for the show-and-tell of the black hole at the center of a galaxy named M87. He watched his screen and waited.
Supermassive black holes like M87’s, which is more than 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, are the universe’s most extreme objects, with matter crushed together into such a small space that even light can’t escape the great gravity. They’re at the centers of most galaxies, which makes them fairly common (astronomers don’t know precisely how many galaxies exist in the universe, but data from the spacecraft indicates there are hundreds of billions out there), yet no one had yet produced a picture of one.
