A few years ago, you embarked on this mission to try and actually image one of these things.And I guess you took -- you focused on this galaxy way out there. Tell us about this galaxy.This is the galaxy -- we're going to zoom into the galaxy M87, it's 55 million light-years away.Fifty-five million. Which is a long way. And at its heart, there's a six-and-a-half-billion- solar-mass black hole.That's hard for us to really fathom, right? Six and a half billion suns compressed into a single point.And it's governing some of the energetics of the center of this galaxy.But even though that thing is so huge, because it's so far away, to actually dream of getting an image of it,that's incredibly hard. The resolution would be incredible that you need.Black holes are the smallest objects in the known universe. But they have these outsize effects on whole galaxies.But to see one, you would need to build a telescope as large as the Earth,because the black hole that we're looking at gives off copious radio waves.It's emitting all the time. And that's exactly what you did.Exactly. What you're seeing here is we used telescopes all around the world, we synchronized them perfectly with atomic clocks,so they received the light waves from this black hole, and then we stitched all of that data together to make an image.To do that the weather had to be right in all of those locations at the same time, so you could actually get a clear view.
