First ever black hole image released

Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

Astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first photo of a black hole, one of the star-devouring monsters scattered throughout the Universe and obscured by impenetrable shields of gravity.

The image of a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white-hot plasma looks like any number of artists’ renderings over the last 30 years.

But this time, it’s the real deal.

It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Details were today published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System, he said.

It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe, he said.