At a Glance

The image shows a swirling circle of red-hot matter being sucked into the black hole. The image was created by data from eight radio telescopes around the world. The black hole is in another galaxy some 55 million light years away from Earth.

Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first-ever image of a black hole, giving visual evidence to research dating back to Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

The image shows red-hot matter swirling at the speed of light around a foreboding dark circle of nothingness, as the matter is sucked into what astronomers call the "event horizon," or the point of no return in which anything that enters the black hole can never escape.

"Science fiction has become ," Avery Broderick, an astronomer at the University of Waterloo, said at press conference where the image was first shown to the public.

This image released Wednesday, April 10, 2019, by Event Horizon Telescope shows a black hole. Scientists revealed the first image ever made of a black hole after assembling data gathered by a network of radio telescopes around the world.

(Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP)

Even more mind blowing? The event horizon captured in the image is larger than our solar system and lives in a galaxy known as M87, some 55 million light years away from Earth.

"We've been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it's easy to forget that none of us has actually seen one," France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, said at the press conference.

The singular image was created from observations by the Event Horizon Team, an array of eight radio telescopes spread the Hawaii, Arizona, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole. The telescopes are outfitted with technology specifically to make their observations of a black hole more accurate, and more likely, to happen, EHT director Shep Doeleman said at the press conference. That equipment includes massive data storage capacity and atomic clocks that lose only one second of time every 10 million years.

Doeleman said "the stars lined up" over a four-day period in April of 2017, when the weather and other variables were perfect for observations at all eight sites.

"We've taken advantage of a cosmic opportunity," he said.

(MORE: NASA's Unexpected Discovery: It Rains On the Sun)

The $50 million to $60 million, with $26 million of that coming from the National Science Foundation, the Associated Press reported.

The astronomers said they weren't surprised by anything in the image, which reconfirms Einstein's general relativity theory. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, they said.

The astronomers added the red and gold colors to the image so it would be easier to see.

Einstein first theorized about black holes a century ago, when he imagined gravity as a distortion of space and time, and surmised that an object small and enough and massive enough could hide behind an event horizon. Scientists now believe that in the centers of all galaxies and can grow to be millions or billions times the size of our sun, according to the National Science Foundation.

Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Ethan Vishniac, who was not part of the EHT team but edits the journal where the research was published, called the image "an amazing technical achievement" that "gives us a glimpse of gravity in its most extreme manifestation."

"Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but there's literally nothing like a picture of the ," Vishniac told the Associated Press.