Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Supermassive Black Hole Silhouette

A close-up image of the M87 galaxy core and the supermassive black hole at its center (Image: NASA).

On April 10, 2019, the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole's silhouette was captured and presented by a team of international astronomers. The network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) set out to obtain an image of a black hole using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This image depicts the center of the galaxy M87, 53 million light-years away with a noticeable dark spot at its core.