On September 5, 2019, the world witnessed a groundbreaking achievement in science as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for capturing the first-ever image of a black hole.
The team, consisting of 347 scientists, spent over a decade working tirelessly to achieve this feat, using a technique that combined the signals received by eight radio telescopes working in pairs around the world.
Directed by Shep Doelman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the team successfully simulated an Earth-sized computational telescope, allowing them to observe the black hole's silhouette and confirm theoretical predictions about these celestial objects.
"For many years, I would tell people that we were going to image a black hole, and they would say, 'Well, we'll believe it when we see it,'" Doelman told AFP in an interview.
"But when you finally come with very strong evidence, when you make a breakthrough like this, then you have the satisfaction of really giving birth to a new field," he added.
The Breakthrough Prize, now in its eighth year, was launched by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to recognize and reward the world's top scientists. Winners from the other categories, life sciences, and mathematics, also took home $3 million.
The team will be recognized at a gala awards ceremony on November 3, at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
