Scientist Capture the first image of a black hole:

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was days from death, but that didn't stop him working.

Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

 The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers were involved in the project. They have worked for more than a decade to capture this. The project is named for the event horizon, the proposed boundary around a black hole that represents the point of no return where no light or radiation can escape.

"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers." 

The massive galaxy, called Messier 87 or M87, is near the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years from Earth. The super-massive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of super-massive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity.

Details of the observation were published in a series of six research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.