Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

History has been made – a black hole image has been captured for the first time.

A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time ever, a historic feat by an international network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

What exactly is a black hole?

Lucky NASA know a thing or two about this.

A black hole is an extremely dense object from which no light can escape. Anything that comes within a black hole’s “event horizon,” its point of no return, will be consumed, never to re-emerge, because of the black hole’s unimaginably strong gravity.

By its very nature, a black hole cannot be seen, but the hot disk of material that encircles it shines bright. Against a bright backdrop, such as this disk, a black hole appears to cast a shadow. 

The details of the black hole image

The historic image shows the shadow of the massive black hole in the center of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy some 55 million light-years from Earth.

See Also: Look Up – List of 2019 Astronomical Events

This black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. Catching its shadow involved eight ground-based radio telescopes around the globe, operating together as if they were one telescope the size of our entire planet.

Want to know more? Visit Black Hole Image Makes History; NASA Telescopes Coordinated Observations.