The first-ever photo of a black hole

On 10 April 2019 the world saw a black hole for the first time — M87*, at the heart of the galaxy M87, more than 50 million light-years away and about 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. The orange ring is extremely hot gas swirling around the black hole; the dark centre is its shadow, where light cannot escape.

To take the picture, scientists used 8 radio telescopes around the world observing together, like one telescope the size of Earth: the Event Horizon Telescope. The April 2017 observations produced about 5 petabytes of data — too much to send over the internet, so hard drives were flown to be combined — with about 4,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.