Black holes are monstrous celestial entities exerting gravitational fields so vicious that no matter or light can escape. The somewhat fuzzy photo of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, or M87, a massive galaxy residing in the centre of the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster, shows a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a dark centre.
The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration involving about 200 scientists begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole. The announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.
The image was obtained using data collected in April 2017 from eight radio telescopes in six locations that essentially create a planet-sized observational dish.
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'Seeing the unseeable': Scientists reveal first photo of black hole