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When surrounded by a transparent emission region, black holes are expected to reveal a dark shadow caused by gravitational light bending and photon capture at the event horizon. To image and study this phenomenon, we have assembled the Event Horizon Telescope, a global very long baseline interferometry array observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. This allows us to reconstruct event-horizon-scale images of the supermassive black hole candidate in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. We have resolved the central compact radio source as an asymmetric bright emission ring with a diameter of 42±3 μas, which is circular and encompasses a central depression in brightness with a flux ratio 10:1. The emission ring is recovered using different calibration and imaging schemes, with its diameter and width remaining stable over four different observations carried out in different days. Overall, the observed image is consistent with expectations for the shadow of a Kerr black hole as predicted by general relativity. The asymmetry in brightness in the ring can be explained in terms of relativistic beaming of the emission from a plasma rotating close to the speed of light around a black hole. We compare our images to an extensive library of ray-traced general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of black holes and derive a central mass of M=(6.5±0.7)×10 9 M e . Our radiowave observations thus provide powerful evidence for the presence of supermassive black holes in centers of galaxies and as the central engines of active galactic nuclei. They also present a new tool to explore gravity in its most extreme limit and on a mass scale that was so far not accessible.

Figure 1: Left: An image spoiled by camera shake. Middle: result from Photoshop "unsharp mask". Right: result from our algorithm. AbstractCamera shake during exposure leads to objectionable image blur and ruins many photographs. Conventional blind deconvolution methods typically assume frequency-domain constraints on images, or overly simplified parametric forms for the motion path during camera shake. Real camera motions can follow convoluted paths, and a spatial domain prior can better maintain visually salient image characteristics. We introduce a method to remove the effects of camera shake from seriously blurred images. The method assumes a uniform camera blur over the image and negligible in-plane camera rotation. In order to estimate the blur from the camera shake, the user must specify an image region without saturation effects. We show results for a variety of digital photographs taken from personal photo collections.