When did the first photograph of a black hole appear?

The historic picture, unveiled on 10 April 2019, showed a bright ring of glowing gas surrounding the dark shadow of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, about 55 million light years away. It was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio observatories around the world linked to act as a single Earth-sized instrument. The black hole is enormous, with a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. Capturing the image required combining vast amounts of data and years of analysis. In 2022 the same team released an image of the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way.