Photographing the Impossible

This is humanity's first portrait of an invisible cosmic giant! Captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and released in 2019, this haunting image reveals the shadow of a black hole, bending space and time itself, while also capturing light-years achieved by astronomers

- Hrithik Kiran Bagade

lies not just in what it shows, but in what it confirms and promises. It validates decades of theoretical work and adds weight to our understanding of how space and time behave around black holes. It helps explain the mechanisms behind active galactic nuclei and quasars — extraordinarily bright phenomena powered by supermassive black holes. It also demonstrates the power of VLBI as a tool for peering into the farthest and most extreme regions of space. This technique can now be refined and used to study the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way — Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) — which is much clos