The first image of a black hole was released in 2019.
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration unveiled an image of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years away. The image showed a bright, asymmetric ring of hot gas surrounding a dark central region known as the black hole's shadow.
This was not a conventional photograph taken by a single telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope linked radio observatories around the world using very-long-baseline interferometry, effectively creating a virtual telescope about the size of Earth. Researchers combined observations made in April 2017 with sophisticated computational imaging methods to reconstruct the ring-like structure.
A common mix-up is Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Its image was released later, in 2022. Another distinction matters too: the image does not show the black hole's interior. It shows light and energized material near the event horizon, together with the shadow created by the black hole's gravity.