BLACK HOLE!

Two things:

Science has, for the first time, photographed a black hole.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity still looks to be accurate.

And I guess technically what we’ve got a photo of is the “environment at a black hole’s event horizon,” which is probably the closest we can actually get a getting a photo of a black hole.
The photo itself, given what other wonders we’ve see in the universe, is underwhelming. But not really. It’s actually pretty cool.

Both Space.com and Ars Technica have good reports on the discovery.

Wired does a nifty job explaining why it’s such a big deal that this photo exists – getting one is extremely difficult.

On to Einstein. This is what Space.com reports:

If the observed silhouette matches the theory-informed simulations, "then Einstein was 100% right," [Dimitrios] Psaltis [an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona] said. "If the answer is no, then we have to tweak his theory in order to make it work with experiments. This is how science goes."

And we learned today that no tweaks are needed, at least at the moment: EHT's M87 observations are consistent with general relativity, team members said. Namely, the event horizon is nearly circular and is the "right" size for a black hole of that immense mass.

"I have to admit, I was a little stunned that it matched so closely the predictions that we had made," EHT team member Avery Broderick, of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, said during today's news conference.

And Einstein didn’t have an array of telescopes as large as the Earth. He had his mind and a motorcycle.

And I sure hope someone played this music as they viewed the pictures.