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On April 4th, 2017, a privileged group of telescopes on mountains across the planet switched on at the same time.
2017年4月4日，位于地球各地的山上的一组特殊望远镜同时开启。
For the next week they danced in unison,
在接下来的一个星期里，这些望远镜
collecting radio waves dispatched from the center of our Milky Way galaxy and from the galaxy m87.
同时收集到了我们银河系中心和m87星系发出的无线电波。
Together they make up the event horizon telescope, a global project to capture the first ever picture of a black hole.
这些望远镜组成了“事件视界望远镜”计划，一个以捕获首张黑洞照片为目标的国际计划。
That's right.
没错。
Ever since physicists first conceived of black holes centuries ago,
自从几个世纪前物理学家首次构想出黑洞的存在以来，
every image of one from our textbooks and our space agencies, they're all illustrations.
我们的教科书和我们的宇航局给出的每一个黑洞的图像都只是一些图解。
Until now.
直到现在。
"We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable."
“今天，我们很高兴要告诉大家，我们已经看到了原本认为看不到的东西。”
For centuries, physicists have theorized that an object with enough mass and density could trap even light in its gravitational field,
几个世纪以来，物理学家一直有一个推论，那就是，一个物体只要质量和密度足够大，就能将甚至包括光在内的其他物体吸附在其引力场之内，
just as you have to travel faster to leave Earth than you do to leave the Moon,
正如一个人要挣脱地球的引力，就必须获得比挣脱月球的引力所需的速度更大的速度，
there could be a place where you'd have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape.
或许，宇宙中就有那么一个地方，是你必须获得超光速的速度才能逃离其引力场的。
And nothing moves faster than light.
然而，没有什么物体的速度是比光速还要快的。
The math from Einstein's theory of general relativity describes an area completely invisible to us within a boundary called the “event horizon,”
爱因斯坦广义相对论公式描述了位于所谓的“视界线”这一边界内但我们完全看不见的一个区域，
and at the center of that black hole is a singularity,
而那个黑洞的中心有一个奇点，
a point of infinite density which is where physics as we know it breaks down.
一个密度无穷大的点，在这个点身上，我们所有的物理知识都将顷刻间崩溃瓦解。
They showed up in the math long ago and they kept reappearing and they sort of persistently would not go away,
它们很早以前就已经出现在数学里了，还在反复出现，而且似乎永远都不会消失，
but Einstein always thought that there must be some physical mechanism
但爱因斯坦一直认为，一定存在某种物理机制，
that prevents stars from collapsing to an infinitely small point, which is actually pretty reasonable.
阻止恒星坍缩到无穷小的点，而他这种想法实际上是非常合理的。
I mean, because it sounds insane.
因为起码听起来是很疯狂的。
Eventually scientists began to see things that only made sense if black holes were real,
最终，科学家们开始看到只有在黑洞存在的情况下才有意义的一些东西，
like the orbits of these stars around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
比如这些恒星围绕银河系中心的轨道。
You see these stars just slingshotting around an invisible point
我们可以看到，这些恒星就是在围绕一个看不见的点弹跳，
and a black hole is the most likely explanation for putting that amount of mass in that small space, for something that's completely dark.
能把那么大的质量汇聚到那么小的空间里，还是一个完全看不见的东西，黑洞是最有可能的解释。
We can also see the glowing material that spirals around black holes:
我们还能看到环绕黑洞旋转的发光物质：
Friction heats this matter up tens of millions of degrees
摩擦会使这种物质的温度上升到几千万度，
and anything that hot emits X-rays that we can detect with telescopes that orbit above Earth's atmosphere.
而任何一种温度如此之高的物质都会释放出X射线，而这种射线是我们能用位于地球大气层上方的望远镜探测到的。
This is a pair of galaxies that pass through each other.
这是一对互相交错的星系。
There are at least nine suspected black holes here, but you can only see them when you look at the X-ray layer.
这里至少有九个疑似黑洞的东西，但我们只能从X射线的层面看到它们。
These dots are X-ray sources linked to suspected supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies three to ten billion light-years away.
这些点都是与30到100亿光年外的那些星系中心的超大质量黑洞有关的X射线源。
And that's just from the small patch of sky.
这还只是浩瀚宇宙一角的情形。
Some super massive black holes also feature gigantic jets of particles,
一些超大质量的黑洞还会喷射巨大的粒子流，
seen here in radio wave data from the galaxy m87, which has a much bigger black hole than the one in the center of the Milky Way.
从来自m87星系，该星系的黑洞比银河系中心的黑洞要大得多，的无线电波数据中就能看出这一点。
No other known source of energy could power these things
其他已知的能量来源都无法带动这些东西，
and nothing we know of besides two black holes colliding
而且，除了两个黑洞的碰撞，我们所知的其他物质
could have produced the gravitational waves we detected in 2015.
也都不可能产生我们在2015年探测到的那些引力波。
Scientists think there are black holes large and small all over the universe.
科学家们认为，宇宙中有很多大大小小的黑洞。
We can see their fingerprints but we didn't have the mug shot.
我们能看到他们的“指纹”，但还是没有它们的“嫌犯照片”。
Directly imaging a black hole has been impossible because they're either too small, too far away, or both.
直接拍摄黑洞的照片一直都是一件不可能的事情，因为它们要么太小，要么太远，要么两个原因兼而有之。
Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, has the mass of four million Suns, but it would fit inside the orbit of Mercury.
位于银河系中心的黑洞人马座A*的质量相当于四百万颗太阳的质量，但其大小还没有水星的轨道大。
Imaging it from Earth is like taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the Moon, with huge clouds of dust and gas in between.
从地球上拍摄它的照片就相当于隔着巨大的尘埃云和气体云，从地球上拍摄月球表面的一张DVD的照片。
So many things had to go right for this image to exist,
成功拍下这张照片需要协调很多东西，
so the first thing that has to happen is there has to be some slice of light that travels all the way from the edge of the black hole
首先，要有一些光从黑洞的边缘一直穿透到地球上，
without getting knocked off course or absorbed by any of the gas or anything in between,
中途不会偏离轨道，也不会被任何气体或黑洞与地球之间的其他东西吸收掉，
and then it also has to make it through the Earth's atmosphere which a lot of frequencies of light don't.
还要能穿透地球的大气层，而很多频率的光波都做不到这一点。
