Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2019

MAY-JUNE 2019 by ESO The Event Horizon Telescope captures the first image of a black hole This breakthroughwas announced on April 10 th in a series of six papers pub- lished in a special issue of The Astro- physical Journal Letters . The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole it- self, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. M essier 87 (M87) is an enormous elliptical galaxy located about 55 million light years from Earth, visi- ble in the constellation Virgo. At the center of this galaxy, the first black hole has been photographed. [ESO]