See a black hole for the first time in a historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-hole-first-time-images-event-horizon-telescope

Scientists have finally captured the first direct image of a supermassive black hole.

The highly anticipated cosmic portrait belongs to the black hole at the center of Messier 87, the largest galaxy we know of, about 54 million light-years away.

The new image comes from the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves. The image revealed Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington and in news conferences in six other cities across the globe shows the dark silhouette of the black hole against the hot, glowing material that surrounds it.

You’re basically looking at a supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system,” or 38 billion kilometers in diameter, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam.

The image shows the boundary between light and dark around a black hole, called the event horizon — the point of no return, where the gravity of the black hole becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever escape. At the center of the black hole, time and space become so curved upon themselves that the laws of physics break down completely.

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