The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes, has managed to successfully capture an image of a black hole, scientists announced at news conferences across the globe on April 10 Beijing time.

A series of six papers about the research, which offered scientists a new way to study black holes, were also published in the US-based Astrophysical Journal Letters on April 10.

The image captured is of the black hole at the heart of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. The black hole is 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.

EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. It is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the universe, according to EHT.

The image also put to the test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity first stated in 1915, which allows for predictions of the size and shape of black holes, scientists said.

[Photo provided by the Event Horizon Telescope]

Source: China Daily