The First Photograph of a Planet Orbiting a Binary Black Hole (1995)
This photograph, taken in 1995, is the first of its kind. It captures a planet orbiting a binary black hole system, a phenomenon that had never been seen before. The image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows the planet in an elliptical orbit around two supermassive black holes
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.