Science & TechFact
The first black hole photo needed an Earth-sized telescope.
In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the shadow of the black hole in galaxy M87, 55 million light-years away and 6.5 billion solar masses heavy. Eight radio telescopes around the world were linked into one virtual Earth-sized instrument. Each telescope produced about 350 terabytes per day; petabytes of hard drives were flown to the computing centres.
Useful: In 2022 came the image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way.
Source: eventhorizontelescope.org