History: astronomers managed to capture the first picture of a black hole

More than 200 people in 20 countries worked on this project. It was a total of eight radio telescopes. Linked together as huge mirror fragments, they created a virtual observatory of 12,000 kilometers, about the diameter of the Earth.

"2017 in April, the telescopes turned to the galaxy 55 million light-years away. It's called "Messier 87" and is centered on a supermbadive black hole. Today, I can say with great satisfaction that we have seen what we consider invisible. We took a black hole, "said project director Shheel Dlemen.

The photo shows a black core surrounded by a crown of orange gas and plasma. Photography resembles black hole drawings created by artists in recent decades. This black hole weighs 6.5 billion times more than our sun.

The telescopes have not seen the black hole itself, whose gravity is so strong that even the light can not escape, but its captured materials – gas and plasma around it.