Astronomers have taken the first-ever image of a Black Hole located in a distant galaxy.
According to The Guardian, it measures 40 billion kms across which is three million times the size of the Earth.
The black hole, which is 500 million trillion kms away in a galaxy called M87, was photographed by a network of 8 telescopes across the world.
In an interview with the BBC, the scientist who proposed the experiment, Prof Heino Falcke said,
What we see is larger than the size of our entire 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 exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.
The image shows an immensely bright ring of fire.
It surrounds a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo you see in the image is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. This light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined.
The edge of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters the black hole. Its gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape.
