An international team of over 200 scientists has captured the first direct images of a black hole. They accomplished this remarkable feat by coordinating the power of eight major radio observatories on four continents, to work together as a virtual, Earth-sized telescope.
In a series of papers published today in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team has revealed four images of the supermassive black hole at the heart of Messier 87, or M87, a galaxy within the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light years from Earth.
All four images show a central dark region surrounded by a ring of light that appears lopsided — brighter on one side than the other.