These strange objects don’t emit radiation directly, but radiation is emitted by matter accelerating as it enters the event horizon of the black hole (this is the region around the center of the black hole where the gravity becomes so high that light, once it enters, cannot escape). Radiation can also be emitted when particle/antiparticle pairs are created at the event horizon, where one of the pair enters the black hole and the other does not (this is called Hawking radiation after the physicist, Stephen Hawking). Using an array of 8 international radio telescopes astrophysicists have used sophisticated signal processing algorithms to turn 14 petabytes of data obtained from observations of a black hole in a neighboring galaxy into the first image of the event horizon of a black hole. From International Event Horizon Telescope ProjectThis particular black hole is located 55 million light-years away (in galaxy Messier 87), is 3 million times the size of the Earth, with a mass 6.5 times that of the Earth’s sun. The below picture shows Katie with hard disk drives used in the black hole event horizon imaging project.

Source: Forbes April 13, 2019 16:41 UTC