What the First Black Hole Image Actually Shows

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]On April 10th, 1919 at six simultaneous press conferences around the world, the team revealed the first image of a black hole. Not Sagittarius A star, M87 star.

[00:00:14]The image shows a bright ring of light slightly lopsided, one side noticeably brighter than the other, surrounding a dark central region. That dark center is not the black hole itself. It's not even the event horizon directly. It's the shadow. The region where light rays were bent so severely that they fell inward, captured and swallowed, never to reach any telescope anywhere in the universe.

[00:00:39]The bright ring is equally remarkable.

[00:00:42]It's mainly light from hot plasma around the black hole, strongly gravitationally lensed into a ring with a much narrower photon ring component embedded within it. Some of those photons may have looped around M87 asterisk one or more times before escaping. But the resulting delays are measured in days, not millions of years. For a limited time only, we are giving out the first three chapters of our complete introduction to stargazing completely free. Check our channel profile for the link.