The Black hole of M87 galaxy

Astronomers have captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy, 500 million trillion Km away and was photographed by a network of 8 telescopes across the world.

The black hole measures 40 billion km across – three million times the size of the Earth and has been described by scientists as “a monster”.

Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal letters.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment said the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

“It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun and it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavy weight champion of black holes in the Universe”.

The Image shows an intensely bright “ring of fire”, as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billion of other stars in the galaxy combined- which is why it can be seen a tsuch distance