Welcome to today's press conference brought to you

by the National Science Foundation

and the Event Horizon Telescope Project.

Thank you all for joining us today.

My name is Amanda Hallberg Greenwell,

I am the head of the National Science Foundation's

Office of Legislative and Public Affairs.

I would like to introduce today's distinguished panel.

Dr. France Cordova, Director of the National Science Foundation.

Sheperd Doeleman,

is the Event Horizon Telescope Project Director

of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian.

Dan Marrone is an Event Horizon Telescope

Science council member

and an Associate Professor of Astronomy

at the University of Arizona.

Avery Broderick is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope

Board and Wheeler Chair of Theoretical Physics

at the Perimeter Institute and Associate Professor

at the University of Waterloo. And Sera Markoff is a member

of the Event Horizon Telescope Council,

a professor of theoretical physics

at the University of Amsterdam

and she coordinates the EHT multi-wavelength workshop.

We will have time for questions after the panel concludes

so please hold all questions until that time.

I will now turn it over to Dr. Cordova.

Dr. France Cordova: Good morning.

Thank you for joining us at this historic moment.

I would like to give a special welcome

to the Director of the White House

Office of Science and Technology Policy,

Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier.

And from the National Science Board,

the current chair, Diane Souvaine and former chair,

Maria Zuber.

Today, the Event Horizon Telescope Project

will announce findings that will transform

and enhance our understanding of black holes.

As an astrophysicist, this is a thrilling day for me.

Black holes have captivated the imaginations of scientists

and the public for decades.

In fact, we have been studying black holes so long,

that sometimes it is easy to forget

that none of us have actually seen one.

Yes, we have simulations and illustrations.

Thanks to instruments

supported by the National Science Foundation,

we have detected binary black holes,

merging deep in space.

We have observed the episodic transfer of matter

from companion stars onto black holes.

Some massive black holes create jets of particles and radiation.

We have spotted the subatomic neutrinos

those jets can fling across billions of light-years.

But we have never actually seen the event horizon,

that point of no return after which nothing,

not even light can escape a black hole.

How did we get here?

Through the imagination and dedication of scientists

around the world willing to collaborate

to achieve a huge goal.

Through a large pool of international facilities,

and through long-term financial commitments from NSF

and other funders willing to take a risk

and pursuits of an enormous potential payoff.

Without international collaboration among facilities,

the contributions of dozens of scientists and engineers

and sustained funding,

the event horizon project would have been impossible.

No single telescope on earth has the sharpness to create

an un-blurred definitive image of a black hole's event horizon.

So this team did what all good researchers do, they innovated.

More than five decades ago,

other NSF funded researchers helped lead the development

of very long baseline interferometry,

which links telescopes

computationally to increase their capabilities.

This team took that concept to a global scale.

Connecting telescopes to create a virtual array,

the size of the Earth itself. This was a Herculean task,

one that involved overcoming numerous technical difficulties.

It was an endeavor so remarkable

that NSF has invested $28 million

in more than a decade,

joined by many other organizations in our support,

as these researchers shaped their idea into reality.

I believe what you are about to see

will demonstrate an imprint on people's memories.

The event horizon project shows the power of collaboration,

convergence, and shared resources,

allowing us to tackle the universes biggest mysteries.

Now I'm going to hand over this to our distinguished panel

starting with Dr. Shep Doeleman, EHT's Director.

[Applause]

Dr. Sheperd Doeleman: Thank you assembled guests,

black hole enthusiasts.

Black holes are the most mysterious objects

in the universe,

they are cloaked by an event horizon

where their gravity prevents even light from escaping,

and yet the matter that falls onto the event horizon

is superheated so that before it passes through,

it shines very brightly.

We now believe that super massive black holes, millions,

even billions in times the mass of our sun,

exist in the centers of most galaxies.

And because they are so small that we have never seen one,

they are though that they can outshine the combined starlight

of all the constituent stars in those galaxies.

The best idea we have of what they can look like come

from simulations like this.

The infalling gas that is superheated lights

up a ring of light where photons orbit the black hole,

and interior of that is a dark patch

where the event horizon itself prevents light from escaping.

The event horizon telescope project is dedicated to the idea

that we can make an image of this black hole.

That we can set a ruler across this shadow feature,

measure the photon ring and test Einstein's theory

where they might break down.

It also allows access to a region of the universe

we can study precisely the energetics

and how black holes dominate the cores of galaxies.

To do this, we worked for over a decade

to link telescopes around the globe

to make an Earth-sized virtual dish.

The event horizon telescope

achieves the highest angle resolution

possible from the surface of the earth,

it is equivalent of being able to read the date

on a quarter in Los Angeles

when we are standing here in Washington DC.

In April 2017, all the dishes in the event horizon telescope

swiveled, turned, and stared at a galaxy

55 million light-years away, it is called Messier 87 or M87.

There is a super massive black hole at its core,

and we are delighted to be able to report to you today

that we have seen what we thought was unseeable.

We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.

Here it is.

[Applause]

This is a remarkable achievement.

What you are seeing here is the last photon orbit,

what you are seeing is evidence of an event horizon,

by laying a ruler across this black hole,

we now have visual evidence for a black hole.

We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times

what our sun does exists in the center of M87

and this is the strongest evidence that we have to date

for the existence of black holes.

It is also consistent, the shape of the shadow,

to the precision

of our measurements with Einstein's predictions.

The bright patch in the south that you see tells us

that the material moving around the black hole

is moving at light speeds,

which is also consistent with our simulations and predictions.

This image forges a clear link

now between super massive black holes

and the engines of bright galaxies.

We now know clearly that black holes

drive large scale structure in the universe

from their home in these galaxies.

We now have an entirely new way of studying general relativity

and black holes that we never had before

and as with all great discoveries,

this is just the beginning.

The imaging of a black hole doesn't come easily,

I can tell you that from personal experience

as can many people here in the audience.

It has required long-term developments, a committed team,

but it also required some very interesting cosmic coincidences.