‘We have collected (information) and built an image that we believe is consistent with what we would expect from a black hole.’ ‘We observed with (eight telescopes) simultaneously, so that as Earth rotates, there are three or four that are always pointing to the (black hole),’ said Dr Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, another principal investigator on BlackHoleCam. Instead, the EHT project combined the power of eight large radio telescopes around the world, from the South Pole to Spain, to create an Earth-sized virtual super telescope. No telescope alone possesses the observational power to observe the supermassive black holes believed to be at the centre of all galaxies. That is one of the reasons such an image has never been taken before. Seeing this event horizon is no mean feat the black hole itself, while 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun, is still incredibly small at this distance. The image shows the shadow of the event horizon around the supermassive black hole inside Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy located 53 million light-years from Earth. ‘It is the first time that this has been possible, and it’s been long in the making.’ ‘History books will be divided into the time before the image and after the image,’ said Dr Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, one of the principal investigators on BlackHoleCam, the European contribution to the EHT. It is the first time in history that such an image has been produced and was the result of a global collaboration of scientists working on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project.

The image shows the event horizon – the gravitational point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape – around the supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.

Blackhole picture