First image of black hole captured by EH telescope

Capturing the first image of a black hole is "an amazing discovery", which also highlights New Zealand's strong contribution to global science, a Dunedin astronomer says.

"It's particularly cool that they've found it," Dr Ian Griffin said.

Dr Griffin is the director of the Otago Museum and a trained astronomer.

The "really exciting" first image also underscored the important theoretical mathematics work undertaken by Kurow-born Prof Roy Kerr, of Canterbury University, who solved Einstein's field equations in 1963.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - an international array of eight ground-based radio telescopes - was designed to capture images of a black hole.

Six scientific papers published on Thursday detailed the EHT image from Messier 87, a galaxy 55million light years from Earth with a black hole at the centre 6.5billion times the mass of the Sun.

Prof Kerr had, in 1963, also described and predicted the existence of spinning black holes, one of which has now been imaged for the first time.

"New Zealand should be celebrating the work of Prof Kerr because he's an amazing scientist and very much has played a major role in theoretically explaining a black hole," Dr Griffin said.

Prof Kerr was a "very, very well respected scientist" in world terms.

Dr Griffin said the excitement flowing from the latest discovery reminded him of when the first direct observation of gravitational waves -also predicted by Einstein - was announced in early 2016.

He hoped young people would be inspired to take up future careers in science after learning about this discovery.

The new image was not "perhaps the most beautiful in the world", but showed significant features, such as "accretion disks" of orbiting material spiralling inward towards the black hole, he said.