Astronomers breakthrough imaging of a black hole via Event Horizon Telescope, with a big collaboration has been successful.
What is a basic black hole ?
A black hole is basically a huge massive dead star, surrounded by a huge accretion disk of gas and dust, which travels close to speed of light. In the black hole gravity is so large not even light (which has zero mass) can escape from it. The surface of the back hole is called event horizon (point of no return), beyond which you see a burning ring in the picture below, this is called photon sphere (basically a shadow of light), caused by bending of light around the heavy objects in space-time (or gravity being space time curvature -> which is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity).
picture credits : EHT
The black hole targeted is located in a galaxy called M87, which is billions and billions of kilometer away fro us. The mass of this monster black hole is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. This photograph was taken by a network of 8 telescopes and has proved Einstein's 100 year old general theory of relativity is correct yet again!
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