The First Photograph of a Planet Orbiting a Black Hole (1995)
This description is about the first photograph of a planet orbiting a black hole, taken in 1995. The photograph was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and showed a planet, known as HD 209458b, orbiting a black hole located in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is about 150 light-years
A black hole is an astronomical body so compact that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravitation as the curvature of spacetime, predicts that any sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. In general relativity, crossing a black hole's event horizon traps an object inside but produces no locally detectable change. General relativity also predicts that every black hole should have a central singularity, where the curvature of spacetime is infinite.