On September 5, 2019 the Breakthrough prize in fundamental Physics was awarded to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. The EHT revealed on April 10, 2019 – the first ever image of the black hole, which shows the 6 billion solar masses black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 located around 55 million light years from Earth.
“An effort of over twenty years of preparation has born fruit in the first image of a black hole, a result of a large collaboration with many astronomers giving their best. We are delighted that our collective effort will be awarded the prestigious Breakthrough Prize. It is a wonderful recognition of patient and thorough work of a great team”, says Prof. Anton Zensus, Chair of the EHT Collaboration Board, Director at the MPIfR and Coordinator of the RadioNet project.
The prize will be shared equally between the 347 members of the collaboration, and will be awarded in a ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California/US, on 3 November 2019.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki, and Pony Ma
Image © EHT