Space factBlack Holes
On April 10, 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole: the one in galaxy Messier 87, 55 million light-years away, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The picture shows a bright ring around a dark center, the black hole’s shadow.
No single telescope could resolve something that distant and that small in the sky. The Event Horizon Telescope linked eight radio telescopes around the globe into one Earth-sized virtual telescope. Its sharpness equals reading a newspaper in New York from a café in Paris. The glowing ring is hot gas whose light bends around the black hole, just as Einstein’s general relativity predicts.
55 million light-years
Distance to the M87 black hole