Four years ago, astronomers released the first ever image of a black hole: a reddish, puffy doughnut of light surrounding an empty, dark hole in the center of the giant galaxy M87, which lies 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
The image made visible what astronomers, and the rest of us, had only been able to imagine: a celestial entity so massive that its gravity warped space-time, drawing matter, energy and even light into its bottomless vortex.
The image was released on April 10, 2019, by an astronomy squad called the Event Horizon Telescope, so named for the boundary of no return around a black hole.
The new image, they say, will sharpen constraints on how well the black hole in M87 fits with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which first predicted the existence of black holes.
Dr. Medeiros and her colleagues published the new image on Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.