National Science Foundation reveals first photo of a black hole

Ah, finally, a photo of my soul. Just kidding (not really). In all seriousness, a groundbreaking announcement today by the National Science Foundation revealed the first ever photo of a black hole.

This is a huge deal — until now, it was thought that black holes were completely unseeable. But after years of research and calculations of black holes based on our understanding of the universe, scientists made black holes seeable. 

"Black holes are extremely dense pockets of matter, objects of such incredible mass and miniscule volume that they drastically warp the fabric of space-time," The National Science Foundation website reads. "Anything that passes too close, from a wandering star to a photon of light, gets captured. Most black holes are the condensed remnants of a massive star, the collapsed core that remains following an explosive supernova."

Now that scientists can actually see what a black hole looks like, scientists now know much about how they form and how they impact their surroundings.