A patch of pure nothing in a faraway galaxy has lately become the gravitational center of attention for radio astronomers. That would be a giant black hole, with the gravity of 6.5 billion suns, that spits high-energy particles from the center of the galaxy Messier 87, which lies some 50 million light-years from Earth. In 2019, astronomers operating a network of radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope dazzled the world by producing a radio map of the entity — the first-ever image of a black hole. It showed…
A Fresh View of an Increasingly Familiar Black Hole
