Here Is The First-Ever Image Of A Black Hole

The black hole has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.

Scientists on Wednesday unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole and its shadow located in a galaxy far, far away.

The black hole was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world known as the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.

"We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole," Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University who led the effort to capture the image, said at a press conference Wednesday.

@ehtelescope @saoastro To be able to image a black hole #ehtblackhole researchers needed to create a telescope with the same level of detail as seeing an date on a quarter from in L.A. from D.C

The black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth, in a galaxy known as Messier 87, and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun, according to the National Science Foundation.

"When you work in this field for a long time you get a lot of intermediate results," Doeleman said Wednesday when asked what he felt when he first saw the image. "We saw something so true. ... it was astonishment and wonder and I think any scientist in any field will know that feeling, to see something for the first time."

.@dvergano explains what exactly we're seeing when we look at the #EHTBlackHole image

The effort of capturing the photo is detailed in a series of six papers published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It wasn't only the science community who was amazed by the results. Twitter had a lot of thoughts:

You can't fool me... #BlackHole ? #YouMeanDonutHole ;)

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