Perspective: What it means for us to actually 'see' a black hole
By Amelia Urry Amelia Urry is a science writer and poet in Seattle. She is also the daughter of two astrophysicists. April 12 at 9:40 AM ‘We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” the astronomer said, like someone who knows history’s ear is pressed against the door. He stood in the hushed attention of the room in Washington as he called up the image on the screen behind him. You know it by now: a smoke ring, an orange doughnut, a blurry circlet of light closed around a profound darkness.
Far greater than its scientific value — besides its pure technological achievement, the experiment is perhaps most remarkable for not overturning the established rules of relativity — the picture seems to matter to us because it is a picture. Our certainty, rendered in undeniable orange and black, has a new heft.
I grew up under these cosmic visions. I remember napping beneath posters of the Pillars of Creation and the Cats Eye Galaxy at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, while my mom sorted through data and proofread grant proposals at her desk. When I was a little older, I would entertain myself by launching a toy propeller in the hallway, to watch it drift along the currents shifting above my head. My mom told me that looking into space with a telescope was like looking back in time.
But light has always helped us understand what we couldn’t see: T.S. Eliot wrote of the “visible reminder of invisible light,” tracing the seen and the unseen both. Early astronomers inferred the invisible presence of gravity by the arcs of stars around their pivots. Modern ones use the oscillating brightness of stars to guess at the planets that may orbit them, tugging these distant suns off balance.
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