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Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

The first photo of superheated material surrounding the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. No light can escape from the black hole itself.

The Event Horizon Telescope—a planet-scale array of ground-based radio telescopes—unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole and its shadow in 2019. The image reveals the central black hole of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo cluster.

On April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope made history by unveiling the first image of the very edge of a black hole, capturing a view of the supermassive object at the heart of the galaxy M87. This black hole is 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun.

"We have seen what we thought was un-seeable. And we took a picture." Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.