https://www.axios.com/first-photo-of-a-black-hole-revealed-a337af76-fc93-4d5e-9cbb-acedf5f9c05d.html?stream=top&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerts_all
For the first time in history, we know what a black hole looks like, specifically the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy called M87....
"We’ve been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has actually seen one," France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, said during a press conference Wednesday.
"Though it is 4 million times as massive as our sun, it is so far away that mapping its event horizon is equivalent to standing in New York and counting the individual dimples on a golfball in Los Angeles," the EHT team explained in a video ahead of the discovery.
Black holes are so dense that not even light can escape them, making it impossible to directly image the incredibly massive objects.
Instead, the EHT effectively revealed the shadow of a black hole illuminated by the matter on the edge of the object's event horizon — the area near the black hole known as the "point of no return," where the gravity is so great that nothing can escape...