Everyone's been talking about how amazing it is we finally have a picture of a black hole. And indeed it is, but there are so many reasons why.
So if you haven't seen it all yet, here are some reason why this is the scientific discovery of the year, and maybe the decade.
The Event Horizon Telescope, which took the picture, isn't actually a telescope we built. ?It's instead comprised of eight radio telescopes in six locations across the globe. They each produced about 350TB of data each day that were stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives, that were later sent for analysis.
The black hole in M87 appears 7 micro-arcseconds. That's a unit of angular measurement that translates to about 1/250,000,000th the size of the full Moon. That's why trying to capture it from so far away was so tough. The EHT however used a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI). This allowed it to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds - enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk caf¨¦ in Paris
Katie Bouman is a young MIT graduate working on the project. She's not even an astrophysics major, but rather studied computer science. She's the key reason behind the success of this mission however, having been the one to develop the algorithm that collated the telescope data and turned it into a visible image.
The algorithm, which Bouman named CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors) was basically to take all that data from the telescopes and combine it all, using the energy readings to simulate a visible image. CHIRP began development way back in 2016, with researchers MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the MIT Haystack Observatory.
Since it involved readings from different telescopes, each would receive signals at slightly different rates, so the algorithm had to also take into account the miniscule time differences and calculate accordingly.
M78 has a mass 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. Even as supermassive black holes go, which it is, that's huge.
The black hole is also approximately 55 million light years away from us. 1 light year is the time it takes light to travel in a single year, which is approximately 9 trillion kilometres. Chew on that.
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For the image, each telescope took readings worth about 1 petabyte, which is about 1000 TB. The HubbleTelescope had previously taken the highest resolution photo ever with 1.5 billion pixels. This EHT image has a resolution about 2000 times more than that.
One thing this photo immediately proves is that Albert Einstein was right. The behaviour of the event horizon confirms his theory of general relativity, as well as other other theories by the late Stephen Hawking.
The black hole's portrayal in Interstellar, is actually the best representation of a black hole we've had until today. It was based off complex mathematical calculations by Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, though it was eventually changed slightly to make it more cinematic for the big screen.
Though many black holes are inert, M78 is absolutely not. This one doesn't just pull in matter and gas from nearby, it also converts it into energy, lots of it. It's like a superpowered nuclear fusion reactor that also works at 100 times more efficiency.
With over 200 scientists cooperating on EHT across 20 countries, the mission wasn't cheap. In fact, reports indicate it cost them at least $78 million.
12. It doesn't help the quantum mechanics vs general relativity debate
Unfortunately, because the black hole image proves general relativity, it raises another question. What about quantum mechanics? The two are counterintuitive, but have separately proven to be true, so scientists are still unsure how the two play together. Though researchers had hoped the EHT's picture would resolve that debate, it looks like the image doesn't hold the clue after all.