My world was jolted by two shadow images: one, thrilling, the other terrifying. After a years-long effort—with 200 other scientists—we made the first image of a black hole, its shadow of no return. Then I fell into debilitating pain. A deadly shadow blot appeared on an MRI of my spine. Faced with emergency surgery and no assurance of success, I sought comfort in memory images from the past and, from collaborative work that engrossed me: images of the whole visible universe could be stored in light circling a black hole. It was a universal memory. An experimental back and forth between the innermost-personal and the astronomical, where shadows and consolation cross.
Then I fell into debilitating pain. A deadly shadow blot appeared on an MRI of my spine. Faced with emergency surgery and no assurance of success, I sought comfort in memory images from the past and, from collaborative work that engrossed me: images of the whole visible universe could be stored in light circling a black hole. It was a universal memory. An experimental back and forth between the innermost-personal and the astronomical, where shadows and consolation cross.
Around the horizon of a black hole, an edge of the universe, light is captured, spun into orbit by the black hole’s powerful gravitational pull. Lying within the orange donut in the famous first image of a black hole, this “photon ring” would be a prize...
1930, Madras, India. On a steamship to England, 19-year-old Indian physics prodigy, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar makes a paradigm-shattering discovery about the life cycle of stars: a discipline pioneered by Sir Arthur Eddington, the world’s most famous...
Black holes stand at the limit of what we can know. The Event Horizon Telescope links observatories across the world to simulate an earth-sized telescope. With this tool the team pursues the first-ever picture of a black hole, resulting in an image seen...
