In the mid-1990s, Sheperd Doeleman, a doctoral student in astrophysics at MIT, became fixated on a radical idea. He thought it might be possible to take a picture of a black hole. In a literal sense, the answer was no, it’s not—don’t be ridiculous. Black holes are fields of intense gravity from which no matter, or light, escapes. Besides, the only conventional way to see an object across 55 million light years of space is to build a telescope dish the size of Earth.

Source: Wall Street Journal April 20, 2019 03:56 UTC