EU basks in black-hole glory

The European Commission and European Research Council have celebrated the latter’s role in funding the first-ever direct visual evidence of a black hole.

“I congratulate the scientists across the globe who made this inspiring discovery and pushed the frontiers of our knowledge,” ERC president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon said in a statement to coincide with the image’s presentation on 10 April. “I’m especially glad to see that scientists funded by the ERC contributed decisively to this breakthrough.”

The image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that upgraded and connected eight individual telescopes around the world to create, as described by the project’s press release, “a planet-scale array” of “unprecedented sensitivity and resolution”. The work was reported in six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.