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Astronomers have taken the first ever photograph of a black hole. It is located in a far, [distance / distant] galaxy called M87, which is 500 million trillion km [from / near] Earth. That gargantuan [numeral / number] is a five followed by twenty zeroes. Scientists [estimate / guessing] the black hole to have a [diametric / diameter] of 40 billion km and to be three million times larger than our [plant / planet] . Lead astronomer Professor Heino Falcke spoke to the BBC about the black hole. He said: "What we [see / seen] is larger than the size of our [entire / entirety] Solar System. It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think [existence / exists] . It is an [absolute / absolutely] monster - the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

The [image / imaged] of the black hole was captured by an [awry / array] of eight linked telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). No [singled / single] telescope exists that is powerful [sufficient / enough] to capture the image. Each of the EHT telescopes is located [highly / high] up on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in the USA and Spain, a [dessert / desert] in Chile, and in Antarctica. A team of 200 scientists [pointed / appointed] the networked telescopes towards the M87 galaxy and [scanned / scammed] it over a period of 10 days. The data they gathered was stored on hundreds of hard drives. It was then [percolated / collated] and processed to produce the image that is now a landmark in space exploration. Professor Sheperd Doeleman called it "an extraordinary scientific [feat / feet] ".