50 million light years away in a galaxy called the Messier 87, a beast black hole is devouring anything that comes near it. Planets, Stars, Dust, Gas, and not even light can escape the grasp of the black hole once it crosses its event horizon.

And yesterday, scientists revealed the image of that supermassive black hole that has a mass of 6.5 billion suns.

This is the first ever picture captured of a black hole.

The new image is the achievement of a project called the Even Horizon Telescope, where 200 scientists used an array of observatories around the world. The observatories collected more than a petabyte of data while it stared at the Messier 87’s black hole in April 2017.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a planet-scale array of ground based radio telescopes, that has captured the first ever photo of a black hole and its shadow. The image revealed the black hole of Messier 87 or M87, a galaxy located in the Virgo cluster.

It took the scientists 2 years to assemble the photograph.

Before the image was captured, the only evidence humans had was that black holes existed by looking for stars that orbited bizarre objects, by capturing radiation from the superheated matter that is swirling into them, or by seeing the particles that are launched by their environments.

European Commissioner of Research, Science, and Innovation, Carlos Moedas said, “If there’s a big moment for all of us, it is today.”

Dr. Ziri Younsi of the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, which is a part of the EHT (Even Horizon Telescope) said, “We have accomplished something many thought impossible by imaging the shadow of a black hole and it provides the strongest evidence to date that such evasive and enigmatic entities do indeed exist. You could never actually see a black hole but because it is so powerful you can see when matter starts to fall into it, getting closer and closer.”

He added, “I was amazed to see the image. I got a sense of tremendous excitement. It’s something we have been working on for 10 years and actually the image was surprisingly unsurprising. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted an image like this. Black holes are such mysterious objects. They represent a point of the universe which is really also the edge of time. If you dropped a torch into one you would see the light extend forever getting dimmer and dimmer but taking an infinite time to reach the event horizon.”

Physicists hypothesized about black holes since they were first speculated as “Dark Stars” In the 1700s.

With the image in their possession, scientists can now start to look at some mysteries of the physics of a black hole, which includes confirming their foundational underpinnings.