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This image is the first direct image made of the surroundings of a
supermassive black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international
array of eight radio telescopes in Europe, North and South America,
imaged the bright, accretion disk of material around the supermassive
black hole at the centre of the nearby galaxy M87. The intense gravitational field
surrounding the black hole produces the appearance of the warped disk
around the central black hole. The size of the allowed the EHT team
to measure the mass of the black hole as 6.5 billion solar masses,
with the image being consistent with the predictions of Einstein's
theory of general relativity. The results are reported in a series of
papers in
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
(Image credit: EHT Collaboration)
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