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Loading contentThe supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, the first black hole ever directly imaged, in 2019.
black_hole:m87-starDataset membership
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Scientific entity. See the evidence framework and authority dashboard.
How M87* connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022.
ALMA is an international radio observatory of millimeter and submillimeter antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
The Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio dishes including ALMA, produced the first image of a black hole's shadow — the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87.
The boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
A region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
A black hole of millions to billions of solar masses, found at the centre of most large galaxies.
The first image of a black hole: the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87, released in 2019.
The radius around a non-rotating black hole — one and a half Schwarzschild radii — at which gravity bends light so strongly that photons can orbit in unstable circles. It sets the size of the black hole's 'shadow' and the bright ring seen in the Event Horizon Telescope images of M87* and Sgr A*.
The compact object of Cygnus X-1 — the first widely accepted black hole. A bright X-ray source in Cygnus discovered in 1964, it is a stellar-mass black hole of roughly twenty-one solar masses pulling gas from its blue-supergiant donor star (HD 226868). It was the subject of a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, which Hawking conceded in 1990.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022.
A stellar-mass black hole of about nine solar masses in a binary system in Cygnus, and one of the nearest black holes with a precisely measured distance from radio parallax. Normally quiet, it erupted in a dramatic X-ray and radio outburst in June 2015 — a nearby microquasar caught devouring gas from its companion.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
European missions, observatories, and space science imagery.