On April 10th, 2019, an international team known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which contained over 200 researchers, unveiled the first-ever direct visual evidence of a black hole. The now-historical image, was revealed to be of a supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a giant galaxy located roughly 55 million light-years from Earth. To achieve this, scientists synchronized eight ground-based radio telescopes across the globe, ranging from Antarctica to Hawaii to Spain, effectively creating a "virtual" telescope the size of Earth. The data was so massive that it had to be flown to supercomputers at the MIT Haystack Observatory and the Max Planck Institute to be processed.
