The highly anticipated cosmic portrait belongs to the black hole at the centre 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 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.
Over the course of a week in April 2017, EHT astronomers on four continents coordinated their efforts to make observations of the supermassive black hole. The two targeted black holes - in the centre of the Milky Way and in M87 - are roughly the same apparent size when seen from Earth, because although the M87 black hole is much larger it's also much farther away.
To perform the observation, the astronomers battled bad weather and glitchy electric grids. They donned oxygen tanks and climbed three-mile-high mountains to escape the interference of Earth's atmosphere. Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT. Finally, they tested their findings against the results of a million simulations of what a black hole might look like until at last, they spotted a match.
Feryal Ozel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and member of the science council for the EHT, called the result the highlight of her career.
Source: Washington-Post
