The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.
"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said. "It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."
The image shows an intensely bright "ring of fire", as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.
The edge of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters the black hole, which is an object that has such a large gravitational pull, not even light can escape.
The image matches what theoretical physicists and indeed, Hollywood directors, imagined black holes would look like, according to Dr Ziri Younsi, of University College London - who is part of the collaboration.
"Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence," he said. "It is remarkable that the image we observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again."
But having the first image will enable researchers to learn more about these mysterious objects. They will be keen to look out for ways in which the black hole departs from what's expected in physics. No-one really knows how the bright ring around the hole is created. Even more intriguing is the question of what happens when an object falls into a black hole.
What is a black hole?
- A black hole is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape its gravity
- Despite the name, they are not empty but instead consist of a huge amount of matter packed densely into a small area
- There is a region of space beyond the black hole called the event horizon. This is a "point of no return", beyond which it is impossible to escape the gravitational effects of the black hole
He also recalled reading a scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually are.
These two previously unknown factors suddenly made the seemingly impossible, possible. After arguing his case for 20 years, Prof Falcke persuaded the European Research Council to fund the project. The National Science Foundation and agencies in East Asia then joined in to bankroll the project to the tune of more than £40m.
It is an investment that has been vindicated with the publication of the image. Prof Falcke told me that he felt that "it's mission accomplished". He said: "It has been a long journey, but this is what I wanted to see with my own eyes. I wanted to know is this real?"
No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is director of a project that set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes.
Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.
A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days. The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to a central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat".
"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes."
The team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
Odd though it may sound, that is harder than getting an image from a distant galaxy, 55 million light-years away. This is because, for some unknown reason, the "ring of fire" around the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is smaller and dimmer.
Reader Comments
Is there any empirical, scientific proof of any of the following statements:
[/SARCASM]
Psi-ence or psyopism is a devolution of the ability to model reality and 'make it real' by basing the legal, corporate and social economy on its predicate or data input parameters.
The bigger the lie the more people believed it.
Until the lie sucked in any capacity to recognise or see or think anything else.
To those who have (in loving truth) more shall be given.
For what we appreciate, appreciates.
To them that have not (un true) more shall be taken away - even the little that they have.
Because what we resist persists. The lie is driven by it own fear of lack of foundation to resist truth as if it is a threat and therefore an evil. And must defend the lie as if it is true against the projections of its own denial accused or assigned in the other and the world 'outside self'. You know many laughed at Hitler but didn't know of the international financial network that was backing him.
Incidentally FALCK is a Danish based rescue company - Falck has been helping people in distress for more than a century
No, they cannot. To have a planet-sized array of dishes, that equivalent area must be filled with telescopes. Eight telescopes do not come anywhere close to that. With this kind of distorted thinking--delusion, what can one expect of their conclusion(s)? The name itself is a misnomer. At a distance of 55MlY they haven't got a clue of what they're really looking at. They'll never be able to go there--even if they could, what they're looking at is not what would be there could they travel FTL. Thus it is impossible to interact with a black hole at that distance to confirm their deluded ideas. That's the basis of experiment--tweaking Nature in such a way that its behavior can be coded for repetition anywhere by anyone.
"T he team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. "
How can a person image something that by definition cannot be detected? Black Hole adherents claim it can be done by inference, looking at the so-called "Event Horizon." But the "Event Horizon" is an imagined feature of a Black Hole--an idea that was not born of data analysis, but shear speculation. These deluded souls have been looking for evidence to confirm their ideas, and using mathematics to shore up their speculation. The main problem is such ideas can never be falsified, because there is no objective experiment that can be performed to verify its behavior, much less its existence. This is not science.
Lets concede that they really are observing an object 5 x10^14 KM away .. .do you think different telescopes only 2 X 10^4 KM apart is going to provide some magical insight - the angular difference is negligible
What about the alleged rotation and movement of the Earth
If the Earth travels around the Sun in 1 x 10^9 KM orbit then you would have multiple viewing points from just one instrument
As with many things, the information is obscured by their distractions - in this case primarily the NZ attack
Oddly enough we also have e.g. "Black Sun – Two Suns in the Sky Confirmed" - [Link] ...
Esoteric Meaning Of The Black Sun - [Link] What are all these CGI images we are being accosted with - esoteric symbols originated from astrology, math and sacred geometry?
The Event Horizon is the name of a starship that used an experimental gravity drive. The drive generates an artificial black hole and uses it to bridge two points in space time
Naughty Beaver - Published on 6 Apr 2019
The first idea is that "images" of black holes "prove" everything about their esoteric math and the religion of Einstein
How can one question the theory of relativity when they have "photographic proof" of black holes?
The second is the symbolism ... if you are into producing fear porn then black holes are the ultimate symbols of terror
Look up images of Black Sun and you will mainly see eclipses ... they are the same image, the same symbol
We are all familiar of the historical associations of eclipses and disasters
Do you think this is just all coincidental?
When did they decide to expand the distance to stars by a factor of 10 ... was their an upgrade to their theoretical model?