First Black Hole Photograph
The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a black hole in galaxy M87
April 10, 2019
Photographing the Invisible
On April 10, 2019, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first-ever photograph of a black hole. The image showed a glowing ring of superheated gas surrounding a dark shadow — the black hole at the center of galaxy M87, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The black hole itself is 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.
How They Did It
No single telescope on Earth is large enough to photograph something so far away. Instead, scientists linked eight radio telescopes on four continents — including sites in Hawaii, Chile, Spain, and Antarctica — creating a virtual telescope the size of Earth. The project generated so much data that it had to be physically flown on hard drives to a central processing facility because it was too large to transmit over the internet. A team of 200 scientists from 20 countries worked on the result.
Why It Matters
Black holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity over a century ago. The image confirmed those predictions and gave scientists their first direct visual evidence of how black holes warp space and time around them. The image was processed largely by Katie Bouman, then a graduate student, whose algorithm was essential to turning raw telescope data into a picture. A second image — of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way — was released in 2022.