Multimedia Gallery - Artist’s rendition with supermassive black hole M87*

June 11, 2022

Artist’s rendition with supermassive black hole M87*

This artist’s rendition includes the first image ever captured of a black hole, the supermassive M87*. The image was captured using the Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration that links radio dishes across the globe to create an Earth-sized interferometer and has been used to measure the size of both M87* and more recently, Sagittarius A*.

This still is from the NSF video Introducing Sagittarius A* (the Milky Way Black Hole).

Learn more in the NSF news release Astrophysicists detect first black hole-neutron star mergers and in this "Science Matters" story. Or learn more about black holes and how they're studied. (Date of image: 2022; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: June 11, 2022)

Credit: Keyi “Onyx” Li, National Science Foundation; NSF and Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only.

Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.

Additional information about general usage can be found in Conditions.

Also Available:
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (218.8 KB)

Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.