Event Horizon Telescope Black Hole Image
2019First direct image of a black hole (the supermassive black hole at the center of M87), published April 10 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration -- also a direct confirmation of general relativity's predicted black-hole shadow shape and size. Landmark paper is "Paper I" of a six-paper series; the EHT collaboration's own pre-2019 methodology and simulation papers (2014-2018) are real, on-topic precedent, not noise.
Discovery Velocity
Normalized OpenAlex paper velocity, one point per year.
Originators
- Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Landmark Paper
Checked 2026-08-30 — interim signal only, see docs/BASIC_ROADMAP.md Phase 10
Enabled By
- Event Horizon Telescope (2017)Scientific Instrumentationbasis: empirical
The Event Horizon Telescope's global VLBI array is the specific instrument that captured the correlated data this image was reconstructed from; the EHT Collaboration's own 2019 papers (ApJL 875, L1-L6) document the array/instrumentation and imaging pipeline as what produced the result, not an incidental tool used alongside it. No prior instrument had the baseline length (up to ~10,700 km) or frequency (230 GHz) to resolve M87*'s shadow. Second real Applied->Basic edge on this graph -- see docs/MASTER_PLAN.md Part IV Item 1 for the admission bar and docs/HISTORICAL_TECH_SCOPING.md Sec 2 for the lineage_only bar both nodes were admitted under.
Connections
No verified edges into the applied tree or elsewhere in Basic yet — never rendered as fabricated, just absent.