M87 Supermassive Black Hole
Naturally, the first photograph of a black hole would never be absent from a list of the best astronomy pictures ever shot (or, in this case, produced). Supermassive black hole M87, also known as Messier 87, is located in the heart of a supergiant elliptical galaxy. The galaxy offers a singular view of a relativistic jet emerging from one end of the galaxy and is located within the Virgo constellation.
When we watch the relativistic jet from Earth, it appears to be traveling at a speed of 4–6 times the speed of light because of how quickly it is travelling. The Event Horizon Telescope, a global collaboration of several radio observatories, captured the first photograph of the black hole in 2019. In essence, the EHT has connected 9 observatories to create an interferometer the size of the Earth.
The EHT team has been investigating M87 in even more detail since that initial image from 2019. Another photograph of the supermassive black hole was just made public last year, demonstrating how the star monster's magnetic field disturbs the accretion disk material. Since then, the EHT team has declared that Sagittarius-A, the supermassive black hole that resides at the Milky Way's center but has never been directly imaged, will be the focus of its network of observatories.
