Scientific team behind world's first black hole image wins 'Oscar of science'  

The 347 scientists who collaborated to produce the world’s first image of a black hole were honored Thursday with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, winning $3 million (Dh11 million) for what is known as the “Oscars of science”, Gulf News reports.

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration grabbed global headlines on April 10 when they published the first image of a supermassive black hole circled by a flame-orange halo of white hot plasma.

Directed by Shep Doeleman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the team spent over a decade simulating an Earth-sized computational telescope that combined the signals received by eight radio telescopes working in pairs around the world with their sights trained on the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, 55 million light years away.