A picture of a black hole is one of those great, self-negating concepts, like the sound of silence, the presence of absence or the lives of the dead. The nature of one refutes the other. But a picture of a black hole has arrived nonetheless — revealed Wednesday morning in simultaneous press conferences held in six different locations around the world.
At those events — in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo — astronomers gave humanity its first look at the black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, nearly 54 million light years from Earth.
