An international scientific team has unveiled a landmark achievement in astrophysics – the first photo of a black hole

News conferences were held in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo to disclose a “groundbreaking result” from the Event Horizon Telescope project, begun in 2012 to directly observe a black hole using a global network of telescopes and international cooperation of more than 200 researchers.

They targeted two super-massive black holes residing at the center of different galaxies

A black hole swallows stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation -theoretically, all that can be seen are objects reacting to the black hole, not the hole itself.

 “Black holes are thought to evolve at the end of a lifetime of a star, and you can think of a star collapsing in on itself to make a super, super dense object.In the case of our own galaxy, we know that there is a black hole, a super-massive black hole, lurking at its heart,” London Science Museum Director of External Affairs Roger Highfield explains.”It is about as big as the orbit of Mercury, it is a few million times the mass of our own sun and we now think that these super-massive black holes lurk at the heart of every galaxy.”
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