Black hole photo: How the EHT super-telescope works
Powerful enough to spot a golf ball on the moon, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a network of radio dishes designed to detect the light cast when matter disappears into the maw of a black hole.
The EHT is one of a number of remarkable astronomical ventures that in recent years have helped to expand our views of the universe.
On Thursday, scientists unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy -- a behemoth known as Sagittarius A*.
So what is the EHT and how does it work?
The EHT is a unique network of antennae across the world that together form a virtual telescope nearly as wide as Earth itself -- about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) across.
The radio-dish network is trained toward our galaxy, the Milky Way, and was launched in 2015 involving 80 different astronomy institutes.
In 2019, the EHT revealed the first image of a black hole called M87* in a galaxy far from our own.
On Thursday, an international team of astronomers gave us the first glimpse of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Dubbed Sagittarius A* the gravity- and light-sucking monster some 26,000 light years from Earth has the same mass as four million Suns.
Observing a black hole is, by definition, impossible, since no light can escape it.
But the EHT circumvents this problem.
It captures the flash of light produced when matter -- planets, debris, anything that comes too close -- is sucked into a black hole's outer boundary, called an event horizon.
"We can detect the silhouette of a black hole against a glowing background of gas and dust," Frederic Geth of Franco-German Millimetric Radio-astronomy Institute told AFP.
British cosmologist Stephen Hawking once compared the event horizon to
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