Doeleman likened the ring structure with light orbiting the black hole to satellites orbiting the Earth, except that the black hole's gravity is so strong that it can grab the light.

The spinning ring's bottom is brighter than its top because "that's where material is coming towards us," moving close to the speed of light, Doeleman explained the image in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

"All the light is being lensed around this photon orbit, much of it coming from behind the black hole," said Doeleman. The dark region is "where light is captured by the black hole," which was "predicted by Einstein."

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow," said chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke with Radboud University.

"This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87's black hole," said Falcke.

"Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," said Paul T.P. Ho, EHT board member and director of the East Asian Observatory.

"The determination of the black hole mass agrees beautifully with earlier measurements inferred from the velocities of stars," Ma Chung-Pei, a professor of physics and astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, told Xinhua.

"Obtaining the same mass from two independent methods boost the confidence that we the black hole hunters are indeed on the right track," said Ma.

But "seeing is believing and an image is worth a thousand words," Avi Loeb, a Harvard theoretical physicist told Xinhua.

"A direct observation of black hole will be tremendous for our understanding of the spacetime that we are in," Yau Shing-Tung, mathematician and a senior faculty member of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, told Xinhua.

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