Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it. “We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University who directed the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C. The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It was a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to a giant galaxy in Virgo, known as Messier 87. There, a black hole about seven billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet some 5,000 light years into space.The image offered a final, ringing affirmation of an idea so disturbing that even Einstein, from whose equations black holes emerged, was loathe to accept it. If too much matter is crammed into one place, the cumulative force of gravity becomes overwhelming, and the place becomes an eternal trap, a black hole. Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space and time come to an end and vanish like a dream.On Wednesday morning that dark vision became a visceral reality. When the image was put up on the screen in Washington, cheers and gasps, followed by applause, broke out. The image emerged from two years of computer analysis of observations from a network of radio antennas called the Event Horizon Telescope. In all, eight radio observatories on six mountains and four continents observed the galaxies Sagittarius and Virgo on and off for 10 days in April 2017. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKMn-dkavHE