What telescope network captured the first image of a black hole?

The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a black hole. It is not one conventional telescope, but a worldwide network of radio observatories that work together using very-long-baseline interferometry. Combining observations from separated sites creates an effective resolving power comparable to a telescope nearly the size of Earth.

The first target was the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years away. The observations were made in April 2017 at a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters. Teams then combined and analyzed enormous quantities of recorded data to reconstruct the characteristic bright ring surrounding the black hole’s dark shadow.

The result was publicly released on April 10, 2019. The image did not show the black hole itself, since light cannot escape from inside its event horizon; it showed glowing material around it and the shadow produced by light bending and capture. The James Webb, Hubble, and Chandra observatories study other aspects of black holes, but none captured that first horizon-scale image.