Astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope have released the first-ever images of a black hole. The image is of the supermassive black hole that lies at the centre of the huge Messier 87 galaxy, in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
Located 55 million light-years from Earth, the black hole has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun. Although black holes are inherently invisible because of their extreme density and gravitational field, the researchers have managed to obtain images near the point where matter and energy can no longer escape – the so-called event horizon.
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