The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio antennae around the globe, has captured the first image of a black hole event horizon. That's right, folks, they turned the earth into one giant telescope to capture the what seemed to be the uncapturable. Here it is, the mighty black hole situated at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy as captured on 10th April, 2019.





Stephen Hawking would be proud.



The image above shows an intensely bright 'Ring of Fire', as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by super-heated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.



However, as immense and powerful as this black hole is, when viewed from the earth, it is extremely small. Compared to the full moon, the shadow cast by the M87 black hole is 46.5 million times smaller. M87's black hole is a whopping 53.5 million light-years away from us. No single telescope on Earth can make that observation, so the EHT team had to get creative. Eight radio telescopes at six locations formed the Event Horizon Telescope Array, which contributed the data used to calculate the image of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy:





Hawaii: James Clerk Maxwell Telescope & Submillimeter Array at an altitude of 4,092m

Mexico: Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (4,600m)

Arizona: Submillimeter Telescope (3,185m)

Spain: IRAM NOEMA observatory, Sierra Nevada (2,850m)

Chile: APEX (5,100m) and ALMA (5,000m) telescopes, Atacama Desert

Antarctica: South Pole Telescope (2,800m)