In case you haven’t been following the news (and who can blame you?), that’s the first-ever image of a black hole:
There’s plenty of writing out there on what it means, much of it going over my head, but here’s some grounding perspective from Scientific American:
It is also worth noting that in the two hours after the press conference, at least six scientific papers on the observation have appeared online. They almost certainly contain clues and new questions that will take more time to process than a 24/7 news cycle can tolerate. For now, though, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the strangeness of nature, and the remarkable fact that these sentient, tool-using bipeds on a small world in a backwater solar system somehow managed to turn their planet into a telescope and take a picture of an exit chute from the universe.
