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Astronomers have the first ever photograph of a black hole. It is in a far, distant galaxy called M87, which is 500 million trillion km from Earth. That gargantuan number is a five by twenty zeroes. Scientists estimate the black hole to a diameter of 40 billion km and to three million times larger than our planet. Lead astronomer Professor Heino Falcke to the BBC about the black hole. He said: "What we is larger than the size of our entire Solar System. It a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think . It an absolute monster - the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

The image of the black hole was by an array of eight linked telescopes the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). No single telescope that is powerful enough to the image. Each of the EHT telescopes is located high up on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in the USA and Spain, a desert in Chile, and in Antarctica. A team of 200 scientists the networked telescopes towards the M87 galaxy and it over a period of 10 days. The data they was stored on hundreds of hard drives. It was then and processed to the image that is now a landmark in space exploration. Professor Sheperd Doeleman it "an extraordinary scientific feat".