First direct image of a black hole

The first direct image of a black hole was achieved by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, announced at Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on 10 April 2019.

In April 2017 scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration used a global network of telescopes to capture the first direct image of a black hole. EHT Collaboration used a technique known as very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), which in short allowed the network of telescopes to act as an Earth-sized virtual telescope, capturing the light surrounding the black hole. The announcement was made by researchers at the National Science Foundation on Wednesday 10 April 2019. The captured image is of the supermassive black hole and its shadow at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87 or M87. M87 is near the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light-years from Earth. The supermassive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.

The telescopes involved in the project were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope.