Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS

Hippos, haloes and black holes — April’s best science images

The month’s sharpest science shots — selected by Nature’s photo team.
  1. Matthew Warren
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

The first image of a black hole shows a bright ring formed by light bending in the intense gravity around the black hole.

Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Ring of fire. Light swirls around the edge of a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87, 17 million parsecs (55 million light years) from Earth. This image, the first ever of a black hole, was released by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration on 10 April. Putting it together was a massive undertaking, and involved combining petabytes’ worth of data (1 petabyte is 1015 bytes), captured by eight radio observatories around the world.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01356-7

References

  1. Madin, E. M. P. et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 286, 20190053 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Madin, E. M. P. et al. Front. Ecol. Evol. 7, 102 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links