Astronomers took the first ever image of a black hole. It is in a distant galaxy 500 million trillion km away. That is a five followed by twenty zeroes. The black hole is 40 billion km across and is three million times bigger than Earth. An astronomer said it was larger than our solar system. It is 6.5 billion times bigger than the Sun. He called it, "an absolute monster" and "the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe".
A network of eight telescopes captured the image. No single telescope is powerful enough to do this. The telescopes are located on volcanoes, mountains and deserts around the world. One is in Antarctica. A team of 200 scientists used the telescopes to scan the galaxy over 10 days. The data was stored on hundreds of hard drives. The image is now a landmark in space exploration. A professor called it "an extraordinary scientific feat".