A glimpse of darkness: Scientists release first-ever image of a black hole

Humanity has a close-up view of one of the universe’s greatest mysteries

Today's expression: Come into focus
Explore more: Lesson #147
April 18, 2019:

For the first time ever, a black hole, one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, has been captured in an image. Scientists released the image of radio waves surrounding a black hole in the constellation Virgo after years of analyzing data collected from eight telescopes around the world. The image confirms many aspects of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Plus, learn the English phrase "come into focus."

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For the first time ever, humanity has a close-up view of one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: black holes

Scientists released the first-ever image of a black hole. It looks like a black sphere, surrounded by a ring of light.

I want to thank a few listeners for suggesting this topic. JR suggested it. You might think he’s not a listener, exactly, since he’s the producer. But he listens to every episode, so he counts. But also Juan from Puerto Rico and Rodrigo from Brazil suggested this topic, too. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that science isn’t exactly my strongest subject. So I’ll tell you what I did. I read a few articles in real newspapers about this. But I still didn’t understand what I was reading. So—don’t tell anyone, this is embarrassing, so it has to stay just between me and you—what I did was, I went to a web site for kids to read about this story. The web site is called Teen Kids News. I’m not even joking. Even then, I didn’t understand everything, but I understood more than when I was reading the grown-up web sites. I did find some good YouTube videos about it. Like, some really good ones. I’ll send them out to our email list, so if you get the emails, then you don’t have to do anything. I’ll also link to them on the web site:

The first image of a black hole

How to understand the image of a black hole

If you’re not on the e-mail list, then you might want to sign up today. Just go to PlainEnglish.com/mail and enter your details there. Here’s why you want to be on there. Every Monday and Thursday—or, if I’m lazy that week, Tuesday and Friday!—but let’s just say twice a week—I send an email with a summary of the episode, links to English articles about the main topic, in case you want to read some more, and an explanation of one other word or phrase that I discussed in the episode.

Okay, let’s get going on today’s main topic.


First images of black holes released

One of the deepest mysteries of the universe came into greater focus, as scientists released the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole. The announcement was made at a news conference in Washington, DC, and simultaneously in five other places around the world on April 10.

The image shows a lopsided ring of light around the black hole at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation known as Virgo.

Let’s pause for a little bit of education on black holes. They are the extremely dense masses of matter in the universe that are so dense, they have a gravitational pull that doesn’t even let light escape. Remember that the more massive something is, the more gravity it has. So these dense areas have so much mass, their gravity pulls so hard, that even light does not escape.

Scientists think that black holes are caused by massive stars collapsing upon themselves at the end of their lifetimes. All the mass of a huge star is still there, but it’s concentrated in a tiny sphere—a really dense sphere that doesn’t allow anything to escape. It becomes a small black hole. A black hole doesn’t suck other material in, but it can grow if other material in space gets too close.

There are no black holes in our solar system—which is probably a good thing. But there are some in our galaxy. How can scientists tell where there is a black hole, if they cannot be seen like stars and planets? One way to tell is if companion stars nearby are orbiting around something that cannot be seen. Just like planets in our solar system orbit around our sun, other stars orbit around each other—or they orbit around an ex-star, a black hole. That’s one way you can tell a black hole exists—if visible stars are orbiting around something that cannot be seen.

Another way scientists can tell a black hole exists is around the types of X-rays and other energy that surrounds these mysterious holes. When gas and other matter in the universe gets too close to a black hole, it gets pulled in very rapidly, generating X-rays and radio waves in the process.

Couple other things. Black holes are spheres. A sphere is like a ball, like a big black basketball in the sky. The shape of a black hole is part of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The edge of the ball, the boundaries of the black hole; that’s called the Event Horizon. Anything beyond the event horizon is inside the black hole. Right around the black hole is an area called the Accretion Disc. This is the area of space that the black hole directly affects most. Remember that the black holes are extremely dense and have tremendous gravitational pull. So just beyond their boundaries, just beyond the Event Horizon, is this zone of influence, where the black hole is exerting tremendous power on everything in its immediate neighborhood. This area is full of dust and gas, and it’s spinning extremely fast around the black hole.

Okay, so now we’re ready to get back to the news and what we saw in the picture. If you saw the picture—and if you haven’t, you can see it on the transcript at our web site at PlainEnglish.com/147—but if you’ve seen the picture, you’re looking at a dark circular area in the middle, surrounded by a donut-like ring of orange. The orange is plasma that’s spinning around the black hole in that Accretion Disc I was talking about earlier. The bottom of the ring is brighter than the top of the ring. Because the black hole is so dense, it actually bends light. So some of the light is being bent and sent back toward Earth, while some of it is going away from us. That is why part of that ring around the black hole is brighter than the rest.

Let’s put the science on hold for now and I’ll share a few other facts about this image and the black hole, and we can get on to something I understand a lot better—and that would be whatever phrase I choose. But a few more things.

The black hole we’re looking at is 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun. Despite how big it is, we needed an extremely powerful set of telescopes to see it, since it’s so far away. In fact, it’s just barely at the edge of what our current technology lets us see in the sky. To see an image like this, we would have needed a telescope the size of the earth. That would be one big telescope. Since that’s not possible, scientists used the next-best thing: a network of eight telescopes around the world, all looking at the same area. The telescopes were located on the tops of mountains, where it was easiest to see into space. As the earth rotated, they could create a virtual telescope by putting together all the data that each one collected over the course of one week in April 2017.

How much data would that be? The equivalent of 5,000 years of MP3 files. They had to load all the data onto physical hard drives, ship it to one location, and analyze it there for about two years. The result was the image that scientists released to the public.


Let’s not do another science topic for a couple of weeks, okay? Yikes, that stuff is hard to understand.

I want to say hi to a couple of listeners. First, another instance of people listening together! You know how much I love hearing that. Natalia gets together in a small group of four colleagues in Munich. They’re all engineers in the automotive industry and they get together on Wednesdays to talk about the main topic and translate new words. I think that’s amazing, so I wanted to send a big hello to Natalia and the Wednesday group in Munich.

Also José from Chile works at a bank during the day and sings in a band at night—he sent me a clip of his band singing a Credence Clearwater Revival song—great band from the 70s. He loves learning English because it lets you learn all kinds of things. One of the things he uses to learn in English is a YouTube channel called Crash Course. I checked it out and it’s really interesting. They’ve got tons of great videos about science, math, history, engineering, computers, business, you name it. The great thing about that is, you pick a subject you want to learn more about, and even if you already know the content of the video, you can start learning the words in English. So check that out, Crash Course on YouTube, thanks to your fellow listener José in Chile.

Today’s episode is a little long already, but really quickly I wanted to remind you that Plain English listeners are eligible for a free audiobook by going to PlainEnglish.com/book . I am reading a book called Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I’m reading it in Spanish. JR suggested it, and it’s really funny. It’s going to be a movie soon, but it’s a great book. And you can listen to it in English on Audible. You know my rule: if I can understand something in Spanish, then I bet you can understand it in English. The words are not hard, but the story is good, really funny. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? If you’re interested in trying an audiobook, then check out PlainEnglish.com/book . And if they’re going too fast—I haven’t mentioned this before, but if they’re going too fast, the app can actually slow down the narration for you. So you can listen at 75 percent speed. PlainEnglish.com/book

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Expression: Come into focus