Miles O’Brien:
Well, we have got the selfie. Up next is the movie.
They’re going to try to expand the number of telescopes on the surface of the Earth, so they can have another opportunity to image this black hole and others in greater detail, enough detail to capture the motion.
Basically, the time exposure was long enough that the motion around it, the gas that was spinning around that black hole, was blurred. It’s just like shooting a waterfall in a time exposure.
So, with a few more telescopes on the surface of Earth, they should be able to freeze the action as it were and create movies. And then maybe, someday, they hope, we can put interferometers, these kinds of paired telescopes, into space, which will be, of course, much farther apart, and which would create a much bigger lens virtually, and who knows what we will find then.
