It is, said one awed scientist, “like looking at the gates of hell at the end of space and time”.
For the first time astronomers have looked into the heart of a black hole to produce an image of one of the most mysterious phenomena in our universe.
The fuzzy image from the centre of M87, a galaxy 55 million light years away, shows a glowing ring in which particles are accelerated to near the speed of light by the crushing gravity of six billion suns.
Beyond this “event horizon” the intense light gives way to something even more exciting — absolute blackness. Or, as astronomers described it yesterday, the “shadow of the black hole”, in which gravity distorts time and space itself, and not
