Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here’s what our telescopes actually capture.

Vox 23 hours ago 

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Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. Nothing can escape one, not even light. But even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one. "There’s really strong evidence for them, and by now every astronomer believes confidently there are black holes," Peter Edmonds, a NASA astrophysicist, told me. "But there’s no direct image." Any photo you've seen of a dark mass warping spacetime … well, that's just an illustration: Why no astronomer has ever seen a black hole directly The biggest problem with trying to detect a black hole is that even the supermassive ones are relatively ...