On 10 April 2019 at 15:00 CEST (Brussels time) the European Commission presented a ground-breaking discovery by Event Horizon Telescope - an international scientific collaboration aiming to capture the first image of a black hole by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. EU-funded researchers play a key role in the project.

Black holes are extremely compressed cosmic objects, containing incredible amounts of mass within a tiny region. Their presence affects their surroundings in extreme ways, by warping spacetime and super-heating any material falling into it. The captured image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. This black hole is located 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times larger than our sun.

Six press conferences around the world took place simultaneously.  In Europe, Commissioner Moedas and lead scientists funded by the European Research Council held a press conference in Brussels to unveil the discovery.…