A multinational group of scientists has revealed the first ever image of a black hole, located in the M87 galaxy about 53.5 million light years away, Trend reported citing TASS.
"In April 2017, all the dishes in the Event Horizon Telescope turned and stared at a galaxy 55 million light years away called M87 and the supermassive black hole at its core, and we are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole," Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington.
"We now have visual evidence for a black hole," he continued. "We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M-87. This is the strongest evidence we have to date for the existence of black holes. It is also consistent … with Einstein’s predictions."
The image was received as part of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which united eight radio telescopes all over the world, including in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and France.
The project was launched to observe two super-massive black holes - SgrA* in the center of the Milky Way, some 26,000 light years away, and the object in the heart of the M87 galaxy (also known as Virgo A).
The observations were carried out in April 2017, but it took two years to process the data.