“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” the astronomer said, like someone who knows history’s ear is pressed against the door. He stood in the hushed attention of the room in Washington as he called up the image on the screen behind him. You know it by now: a smoke ring, an orange doughnut, a blurry circlet of light closed around a profound darkness. By the end of the day, it would be familiar to millions of people as the first photo ever taken of a black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a collaboration of eight radio telescopes around the world, pieced together this picture from observations made from Antarctica and Arizona.