When Was the First Photograph of a Black Hole Taken?

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first-ever direct image of a black hole on April 10, 2019. The image showed the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87, located approximately 55 million light-years from Earth. The black hole has a mass roughly 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. Capturing the image required linking eight radio telescopes across four continents to form a virtual Earth-sized telescope. The data — about 5 petabytes — was so massive it had to be shipped on physical hard drives rather than transmitted over the internet.