If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to
a familiar orange ring. At a glance it may not look like much — a fuzzy glowing doughnut, bulging slightly at the bottom and,
as of last month, streaked with curving lines — but in reality this unassuming circle is humanity’s first glimpse of a black hole, with the colors chosen not to mimic realism, but to indicate the intensity of radio emissions.
Captured in a picture so sharp that it was like reading the date on a quarter in Los Angeles while standing in Washington, D.C., the image revealed a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than our own sun at the heart of a galaxy 55 million light-years away. The tiny details of the picture have revealed that the black hole is spinning clockwise and consuming the equivalent of hundreds of Earth masses every year. Even the newly hewn lines represent telltale signatures of a strong magnetic field.
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