"It's particularly cool that they've found it,'' Dr Ian Griffin says. "It's a great day when you see things like that.''
Producing the image through the use of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - an international array of eight ground-based radio telescopes - was a big development in international science.
But Dr Griffin, who is the Otago Museum director, said the discovery also highlighted New Zealand's strong contribution to global science.
And, in particular, the "really exciting'' first image also underscored the important theoretical mathematics work undertaken by Kurow-born Canterbury University Distinguished Professor Roy Kerr, who solved Einstein's field equations in 1963.
The Event Horizon Telescope was designed to capture images of a black hole.
A series of scientific papers published this week detailed the EHT image from Messier 87, a galaxy 55 million light years from Earth with a black hole at the centre 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.
"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 "very, very exciting discovery''.
The new image was, in itself, 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.
Prof Kerr said the EHT photo was "just the beginning of a new phase in the understanding of our universe''.
Prof David Wiltshire, of Canterbury University, said the latest discovery was a "red letter day'' for Prof Kerr and a "great step forward for science''.
Prof Kerr has received many awards, including the New Zealand Hector Medal (1982) and Rutherford Medal (1993); and, in 2013, he became the first New Zealander to receive the Albert Einstein Medal, in 2013.
