Astronomers have taken the first ever photograph a black hole. It is located a far, distant galaxy called M87, which is 500 million trillion km Earth. That gargantuan number is a five followed twenty zeroes. Scientists estimate the black hole to have a diameter 40 billion km and to be three million times larger than our planet. Lead astronomer Professor Heino Falcke spoke to the BBC the black hole. He said: "What we see is larger than the size our entire Solar System. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that the Sun. And it is one the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster - the heavyweight champion black holes in the Universe."
The image the black hole was captured an array of eight linked telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). No single telescope exists that is powerful enough to capture the image. Each the EHT telescopes is located high on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains the USA and Spain, a desert Chile, and in Antarctica. A team 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes the M87 galaxy and scanned it over a period of 10 days. The data they gathered was stored hundreds of hard drives. It was then collated and processed to produce the image that is now a landmark space exploration. Professor Sheperd Doeleman called it "an extraordinary scientific feat".
