Astronomers have crafted an image of the outermost edge of a supermassive black hole, which is situated at the center of a galaxy dubbed M87, around fifty million light-years away from Earth.

An international team of researchers created a linkage among four telescopes situated in California, Hawaii and Arizona, and created a “virtual telescope” of a great strength to craft an image of the supermassive black hole’s outermost edge.

The image, created for the first time, allowed the researchers to estimate how close matter can reach before arriving at the point of no return, which is called “event horizon.”

The team of researchers cautiously timed the signals coming from the outer side of the back hole at each of the four telescopes, and turned them into a single giant telescope so that they could resolve details of the environment near the black hole. The whole system was capable of imaging the area around the supermassive black hole down to a resolution on the Schwarzchild radius scale.

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of almost all galaxies. Rings of matter known as accretion disks surround the black hole, while their contents wait to be sucked into the black hole’s core, in the same way as water circles the drain.

The study was published in the journal Science online on Thursday.