(CNN) In April 2017, scientists used a global network of telescopes to see and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole, according to an announcement by researchers at the National Science Foundation Wednesday morning. They captured an image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow at the center of a galaxy known as M87.

This is the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist, the researchers said. In the image, a central dark region is encapsulated by a ring of light that looks brighter on one side.

The massive galaxy, called Messier 87 or M87, is near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth. The supermassive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable," said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. "We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole."

The black hole image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers were involved in the project. They have worked for more than a decade to capture this. The project is named for the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.

Read More</s>The incredible “ring of fire” black hole was photographed 55 million light-years away from Earth in the galaxy Messier 87. Astronomers on Earth linked eight powerful radio telescopes to snap what is essentially the shadow of the black hole, cast by the glowing clouds of gas around it. The monumental breakthrough was published today across six scientific papers in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The black hole picture is a remarkable achievement because it is not a computer simulation – it is the real deal.

Sheperd S Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, said: “We have taken the first picture of a black hole. “This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.” EHT astronomers unveiled the black hole image today after two years of linking together eight radio telescope observatories around the globe into one powerful instrument. Professor Derek Ward-Thompson, University of Central Lancashire, said: “This is a truly remarkable result. Obtaining an image of a black hole is not as easy as snapping a photo with an ordinary camera. READ MORE: First image EVER captured by Event Horizon telescope

“However, the power created by linking up all these telescopes around the world is immense. “It’s the equivalent of being able to see an object on the surface of the Moon that is only a few centimetres across. “Until now, this was the domain of science fiction and artist’s impressions. “To be a part of the first team to image a black hole is an amazing feeling. “This achievement stands right up there with any other feat in astronomy.” READ MORE: Is there LIFE inside a Black Hole? Or never-ending nothingness?

Black holes are powerful wells of gravity, which have been around since shortly after the Big Bang or are created when stars collapse in on themselves.

Black holes are incredibly hard to comprehend objects because they warp the time-space around them unlike anything else in the universe. At the centre of each black hole is a singularity or a point where the black hole’s density is infinitely squeezed into an infinitely small amount of space. Around a black hole is also the so-called event horizon, which is a point of no return past which escaping a gravity is impossible. READ MORE: Astrophysicist claims you can LIVE inside of a black hole

How did the Event Horizon Telescope take the black hole picture? Black holes are extraordinary but they are impossible to look at directly and are impossible to take photographs of. Instead, the EHT’s astronomers looked at the accreted ring of bright material around the black hole in order to capture the “black hole's shadow”. Heino Falcke of Radboud University and the EHT science council said: “If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before. “This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole.” Paul TP Ho, an EHT board member, said: “Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields.</s>The European Southern Observatory revealed earlier this week that a big announcement was on the way. An international team of astronomers and engineers working on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project are seeding news publications for what ScienceAlert reports could be the first-ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon.

If true, the ESO's 10 April event will be a monumental one for science — the first glimpse of the single most fantastic, epic and mysterious object in the known universe (possibly only competing with that other dark enigma, dark matter)

Black holes are points in space that have a gravitational pull so strong, not even light can escape from it. Legendary physicist Albert Einstein spent the better half of his life trying to prove his own prediction that black holes exist.

Since then, 103 years have passed, and we still haven't seen what a black hole really looks like. Enter, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project that promises to change that.

The EHT is a network of many ground-based radio observatories or radio telescope facilities around the world coordinated to produce a single, high-sensitivity, high-resolution telescope. Astronomers have been using it since 2006 to peer into Sagittarius A* — a monster black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Also check out: Stunning images of black holes that we've never actually "seen"

Why is photographing a black hole not easy?

Sagittarius A* is the closest supermassive black hole to Earth. It is thought to be located at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The goal with Sagittarius A* is to look past the space debris around it to catch a glimpse of its event horizon — the point at the "edge" of a black hole at which matter and light (and spaceships, in the case of sci-fi films) can no longer escape the pull of a black hole.

While we share a home galaxy with it, the (fortunate) distance separating us from Sagittarius A* is a huge stretch for modern telescopes to overcome. Other, smaller black holes that are much closer have been proposed by astronomers, but much like Sagittarius A*, still remain problematic to spot, let alone photograph.

Perhaps the EHT project is going to tell us otherwise — that it has been 103 years, but they've finally cracked it.

When and where to watch the big reveal live

The discovery made by the EHT team will be streamed live Wednesday evening (10 April) in a press conference starting 9 am EDT (6.30 pm IST).

You can catch a live stream here through the stream embedded below, courtesy of the National Science Foundation, or directly on the NSF's website.

Tech2 is now on WhatsApp. For all the buzz on the latest tech and science, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Tech2.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.</s>In April 2017, scientists used a global network of telescopes to see and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole, according to an announcement by researchers at the National Science Foundation Wednesday morning. They captured an image of the black hole at the center of a galaxy known as M87.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. “We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.”

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole.

In their attempt to capture an image of a black hole, scientists combined the power of eight radio telescopes around the world using Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry, according to the European Southern Observatory, which is part of the EHT. This effectively creates a virtual telescope around the same size as the Earth itself.

Black holes are made up of huge amounts of matter squeezed into a small area, according to NASA, creating a massive gravitational field which draws in everything around it, including light.</s>Earth saw its first image of a black hole Wednesday, and a University of Illinois professor led a team that helped interpret the data used to create it.

The picture, released first in a scientific journal, shows a supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which can be seen in the Virgo constellation through a telescope from Earth. The data used to create the image could help scientists better understand gravity and other phenomena, said Charles Gammie, an astronomy and physics professor at the University of Illinois.

The experiment was called the Event Horizon Telescope, named for the event horizon, or the edge of the black hole, Gammie said. It took more than 200 researchers and eight telescopes around the world to create the picture.

The image itself looks a little like a fuzzy, glowing, orange doughnut. The black hole is in the center.

“What we’re seeing is light from the stuff that’s falling into the black hole,” said Gammie, a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council. “As it’s on its way in, it gets heated up to tremendously high temperatures (and it glows) … The gravitational pull bends the light into this sphere shape.”

That intense gravitational field is also part of what makes it so hard to capture an image of the cosmic bodies. Black holes, often created by the death of massive stars and found at the centers of galaxies, have enormous masses but compact sizes. The gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape.

This breakthrough has given scientists a window into the mysterious abyss of black holes.

Gammie led a team that published one of six papers released with the image Wednesday. His team, which included graduate students, built computer simulations of the black hole to interpret some of the data the Event Horizon telescopes brought in.

One aspect Gammie’s team honed in on was how black holes interact with their environments. Almost every galaxy in the universe has a black hole at its center, including our Milky Way, he said. Some have jets coming out of the center, almost like electromagnetic waves.

His team’s models found that the jets are generated only if a black hole is spinning.

“You have all this energy stored in the black hole. It’s spinning around and dragging all this space with it,” Gammie said. “If you can tap into that like a flywheel, you can get the energy out and it goes into the jet.”

With this breakthrough out to the public, the science world has a lot of work ahead, Gammie said. There is still data to be analyzed, and the telescopes are being upgraded to deliver clearer pictures of the Messier 87 galaxy. There is even talk of putting a telescope in space to extend the reach of the network, he said.

“We found some really cool things,” Gammie said. And this is just the beginning.</s>The world is seeing the first-ever image of a black hole Wednesday, as an international team of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope project released their look at the massive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The image shows a dark disc "outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon," the consortium said.

"As an astrophysicist, this is a thrilling day for me," said National Science Foundation Director France A. Córdova.

The enormous black hole is some 55 million light years from Earth, with a mass some 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

Córdova led a news conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss the team's finding — a process that took place simultaneously on four continents, as researchers held press conferences to share news of what they're calling "a groundbreaking result."

It's well known that a black hole's gravity is so overpowering that even light cannot escape its center. But black holes also dramatically affect their surrounding space, most obviously by creating an accretion disk — the swirl of gas and material that rapidly orbits their singularities.

"Black holes are the X-games of physics. They represent an unexplored extreme of space-time," as astrophysicist Adam Frank wrote for NPR in 2017. "While we now have good indirect evidence that they exist, getting a direct view of a black hole is the ultimate dream for a lot of physicists."

A breakthrough in black hole detection promises to answer a question that has dogged scientists since Albert Einstein proposed the existence of black holes in his general theory of relativity: how do you document the presence of something that's invisible?

Researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope project say they were able to create an image of a black hole by using a network of eight radio telescopes to create "a virtual telescope dish as large as the Earth itself," the National Science Foundation says.

That array of telescopes is in places from Antarctica to Arizona. Before scientists can analyze data from the network, a painstaking process must take place. Each signal received by the telescopes must be synchronized wave by wave, using atomic clocks and a supercomputer to correlate and combine observations from around the world.

To find a black hole massive enough to potentially be visible from an Earth-sized telescope, the Event Horizon researchers focused on "supermassive" black holes that are found at the centers of galaxies.

The team focused on "the relatively small but 'nearby' supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and the distant, but extremely massive, black hole at the center of the galaxy M87," Adam Frank wrote about the team's work in late 2017.</s>A ring of light, surrounding a region of darkness representing the actual black hole, forms when disrupted matter and radiation circle at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon.

WASHINGTON An international scientific team yesterday announced a milestone in astrophysics - the first photo of a black hole - using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape.

The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration that started in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole using a global network of Earth-based telescopes.

The announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.

The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth.

Black holes, phenomenally dense celestial entities, are extraordinarily difficult to observe despite their great mass.

A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets swallowed into oblivion.

"This is a huge day in astrophysics," said US National Science Foundation Director France Córdova. "We're seeing the unseeable."

The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult.

The scientists look for a ring of light - disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole.

This is known as the black hole's shadow or silhouette.</s>The world's very first simulation of a black hole created 40 years ago was surprisingly close to an image of the real thing released to acclaim by scientists yesterday, it has been revealed.

The image - created by Dr Jean-Pierre Luminet, then a young researcher at The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) - had a worldwide impact at the time of its release in 1979.

It was particularly revolutionary as the existence of black holes was still highly theoretical at the time and a point of much debate among the scientific community.

The simulation shares a number of characteristics with the image released yesterday by the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the first time a direct observation of a black hole's event horizon has been captured.

Dr Luminet's picture is not an artist's impression but is instead based on the then supposed physical properties of a black hole and its gas disc - including its rotation rate and temperature - and on Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Using computer data, Dr Luminet drew several thousand black dots on a white sheet by hand. He then took a photographic negative to produce the final image.

He envisioned a black circle, which had not yet become known as the shadow of the black hole as it is today, in the centre of a glowing accretion disc with one side clearly brighter than the other.

This is because there are two effects that shift the radiation that reaches us from the disc, the Einstein and Doppler effects.

The Einstein effect describes how the gravitational field of a black hole distorts the light that reaches us.

This makes light from the part of the accretion disc behind the black hole appear as visible above it.

The Doppler effect describes how gas racing around the black hole toward us appears brighter, an effect caused by the rotation of the accretion disc around the black hole.

These are all characteristics that can be found in the real image obtained forty years later by the EHT, indicating just how accurate this first simulation was.

These effects can be seen even more clearly in an updated version of the simulation that Dr Luminet and his team released in 1991 with added orange colouration highlighting Doppler distortions and asymmetries.

Scientists yesterday lifted the veil on the first images ever captured of a black hole’s event horizon.

In a highly-anticipated string of press conferences held simultaneously around the world on Wednesday, the team behind the EHT revealed the findings from their first run of observations.

Using a ‘virtual telescope’ built from eight radio observatories positioned at different points on the globe, the international team has spent the last few years probing Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, and another target called M87 in the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

While black holes are invisible by nature, the ultra-hot material swirling in their midst forms a ring of light around the perimeter that reveals the mouth of the object itself based on its silhouette. This boundary is known as the event horizon.

'We have seen what we thought was unseeable,' EHT Director Sheperd Doeleman said as he introduced the glowing orange ring that is the object at the center of Messier 87 (M87) – and our first direct look at a black hole.

The breakthrough adds major support for Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and could help to answer longstanding questions on the nature of black holes.

The observations from the Event Horizon Telescope can now be counted among of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the century.

The April 10 event focused on the results from the first full run of the observatory network, which was conducted in 2017 through the collaboration of scientists operating eight radio observatories.

While the image might seem unremarkable to some, these findings 'will transform and enhance our understanding of black holes,' said National Science Foundation Director France Cordova as she kicked off the live event in Washington DC.

Developing the technology to get the image was a 'Herculean task' in itself the researchers said; no single telescope is powerful enough to image a black hole in such detail on its own.

But, through international collaboration and an array of instruments, the team built a virtual telescope essentially as large as Earth itself, allowing them to peer into Messier 87, which lies 55 million light years away, to see the black hole at its center.

The data required more than 'half a ton of hard drives,' according to Dan Marrone, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

The eight telescopes collected 5 petabytes of data - or the 'equivalent of 5,000 years of mp3s,' or 'a lifetime of selfies for 40,000 people.'

'We now have visual evidence for a black hole,' Professor Doeleman said. 'We now know that a black hole exists at the center of M87. Material moving around the black hole is moving at light speeds.

'We now have an entirely new way of discovering black holes that we’ve never had before, and like all new discoveries this is just the beginning.'

The find was in part thanks to Dr Katie Bouman, now 29, a graduate at MIT who created an algorithm that collects data from telescopes across the world to stitch together a single photograph.

Her work, which essentially turned Earth into a virtual telescope, has been praised across the political spectrum by First Daughter Ivanka Trump, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and by A-listers including Sophia Bush and Olivia Munn.

Without her groundbreaking work, the supermassive black hole would be simply impossible to capture because it would need a 6,200 mile (10,000 km) wide telescope dish to even attempt it. The largest telescope dish in the world currently is just a 1,000ft in diameter.

Despite helping a team of scientists at Event Horizon Telescope make the impossible possible, the electrical engineering and computer science graduate hasn't let the grand feat go to her head.

Sharing her achievement on Facebook, Dr Bouman wrote: 'Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed.'</s>An international scientific team on April 10 announced a milestone in astrophysics - the first-ever photo of a black hole - using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape.

The team's observations of the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster, lend strong support to the theory of general relativity put forward in 1915 by physicist Albert Einstein to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.

The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration begun in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole using a global network of Earth-based telescopes. The announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," said astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Black holes, phenomenally dense celestial entities, are extraordinarily difficult to observe despite their great mass. A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets swallowed into oblivion.

"This is a huge day in astrophysics," said US National Science Foundation Director France Cordova. "We're seeing the unseeable."

The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists look for a ring of light - disrupted matter and radiation circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole's shadow or silhouette.

Astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis of the University of Arizona, the EHT project scientist, said, "The size and shape of the shadow matches the precise predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, increasing our confidence in this century-old theory."

"Imaging a black hole is just the beginning of our effort to develop new tools that will enable us to interpret the massively complex data that nature gives us," Psaltis added.

The project's researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 using telescopes in the US states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as in Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the global network. The global network of telescopes has essentially created a planet-sized observational dish.</s>The world is seeing the first-ever image of a black hole Wednesday, as an international team of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope project released their look at the massive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The image shows a dark disc "outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon," the consortium said.

"As an astrophysicist, this is a thrilling day for me," said National Science Foundation Director France A. Córdova.

The enormous black hole is some 55 million light years from Earth, with a mass some 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

"I am delighted to report that we have for the first time we have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT Director Shep Doeleman, of Harvard University.

Córdova and Doeleman led a news conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss the team's finding — a process that took place simultaneously on four continents, as researchers held press conferences to share news of what they're calling "a groundbreaking result."

"You have probably seen many, many images of black holes before," said Heino Falcke, a principal investigator on BlackHoleCam. "But they were all simulations or animations. And this [image] is precious to all of us, because this one is finally real."

Pointing to the screen at the European Research Council's news conference in Brussels, Falcke said that the much-sought-after image "looks like a ring of fire. And it's actually created by the force of gravity, by the deformation of space-time, where light actually goes around the black hole, almost in a circle."

The black hole is some 100 billion kilometers across. But despite its massive size, anyone trying to find it in the night sky from the Earth's surface would face the same challenge if they stood in Brussels and wanted to see a mustard seed in Washington, Falcke said.

It's well known that a black hole's gravity is so overpowering that even light cannot escape its center. But black holes also dramatically affect their surrounding space, most obviously by creating an accretion disk — the swirl of gas and material that rapidly orbits their singularities.

"Black holes are the X-games of physics. They represent an unexplored extreme of space-time," as astrophysicist Adam Frank wrote for NPR in 2017. "While we now have good indirect evidence that they exist, getting a direct view of a black hole is the ultimate dream for a lot of physicists."

A breakthrough in black hole detection promises to answer a question that has dogged scientists since Albert Einstein proposed the existence of black holes in his general theory of relativity: how do you document the presence of something that's invisible?

Researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope project say they were able to create an image of a black hole by using a network of eight radio telescopes to create "a virtual telescope dish as large as the Earth itself," the National Science Foundation says.

That array of telescopes is in places from Antarctica to Arizona. Before scientists can analyze data from the network, a painstaking process must take place. Each signal received by the telescopes must be synchronized wave by wave, using atomic clocks and a supercomputer to correlate and combine observations from around the world.

In a few weeks of observing the black hole, the EHT project amassed five petabytes of data — which Dan Marrone of the University of Arizona said was equivalent to "all of the selfies that 40k people will take in their lifetime."

To find a black hole massive enough to potentially be visible from an Earth-sized telescope, the Event Horizon researchers focused on "supermassive" black holes that are found at the centers of galaxies.

The team focused on "the relatively small but 'nearby' supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and the distant, but extremely massive, black hole at the center of the galaxy M87," Adam Frank wrote about the team's work in late 2017.
Katie Bouman and scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope project release the first ever photograph of the event horizon of a black hole, that of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 galaxy, taken using a network of eight radio telescopes around the world.