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The most-visualized black hole of all, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar, shows a predicted event horizon fairly accurately for a very specific class of rotating black holes. Deep within the gravitational well, time passes at a different rate for observers than it does for us far outside of it. The Event Horizon Telescope is expected to reveal the emissions surrounding a black hole's event horizon, directly, for the first time. INTERSTELLAR / R. HURT / CALTECH

Ethan Siegel
Apr 2, 2019

 

In science, there's no moment more exciting than when you get to confront a longstanding theoretical prediction with the first observational or experimental results. Earlier this decade, the Large Hadron Collider revealed the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered fundamental particle in the Standard Model. A few years ago, the LIGO collaboration directly detected gravitational waves, confirming a longstanding prediction of Einstein's General Relativity.

And in just a few days, on April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope will make a much-anticipated announcement where they're expected to release the first-ever image of a black hole's event horizon. At the start of the 2010s, such an observation would have been technologically impossible. Yet not only are we about to see what a black hole actually looks like, but we're about to test some fundamental properties of space, time, and gravity as well.

 

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