Physicists attempt to break the rules of gravity

A new test of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has proved the iconic physicist right again – this time by reanalysing the famous first-ever picture of a black hole, which was released in April 2019.

- Rafi Letzter

That image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 87 is the first direct observation of a black hole’s shadow – the imprint of the event horizon, a sphere around the black hole’s singularity from which no light can escape. Einstein’s theory predicts the size of the event horizon based on the mass of the black hole, and in April 2019 it was already clear that the shadow fits general relativity’s prediction well.