Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us

In April 2019, about four billion people around the world were able to see the first-ever image of a black hole (55 million light-years from Earth, the center of galaxy M87). Hanno Falcke, who led the international research team, and science journalist Jörg Römer wrote a book about what came before that image. Readers of “Light in the Dark” will learn how a group of enthusiastic scientists first convinced the resource distributors (money, radio telescopes, powerful computers) to allocate enough of them for the envisioned project—and then carried out observations, analyzed the data, and finally obtained the long-awaited image. “A mythical creature the size of the cosmos gained form and color, and everyone could see it,” Falcke sums up. He worked on this project for more than twenty years, and as a believing Christian pastor—an amateur clergy—he was not afraid that many call black holes “gates of Hell,” because the purpose of science is to push the boundaries of the unknown.