The First Photo

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-sized network of radio telescopes — released the first-ever image of a black hole's shadow.

The image showed a bright ring of superheated gas orbiting the black hole, with a dark shadow in the center where light cannot escape. Producing it required 5 petabytes of data — so much it was faster to ship hard drives by plane than to transfer it online.