Messier 87

What do you know? A few weeks after I joke about circles, everybody is suddenly interested in circles!
Of course, this circle is something worth looking at. This last week, scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope Project unveiled the first-ever direct image taken of a Black Hole and its event horizon. Now, it may not look like the classical depiction (or many of the depictions we've made on this site, for that matter), but it actually fits really well into our predictions- a black sphere of spatial nothing-ness surrounded by a firey accretion disk.
Fun fact: the disk isn't firey in the same sense as the sun is- it glows from the raw energy that the matter inside requires to stay outside the event horizon- roughly enough to travel the speed of light. It appears to us because of the way the black hole distorts space-time around it. As it stretches the fabric of the universe towards its singularity and the material falling into it travels faster and faster, the light around it becomes distorted as its wavelength is pulled outward towards the redder ends of the spectrum. We normally see this type of activity on the scale of galaxies, but what may very well be the densest object in the universe serves us just as well.
Fun details aside, we have to acknowledge just how monumental of an occasion this is. When Einstein discovered that his equations for relativity allowed them to exist, he frantically searched for a reason for them not to. Fifty years ago, we still had little idea of what they looked like. Ten years ago, there wasn't any way to get a proper look at one. Now, looking at a piece of the sky four hundred million times smaller than our moon's apparent size, we are left to wonder how much further we can really go. Is the edge of the universe really that far away after all? If our inability to look at one is now revoked, what about our ability to approach one? To look inside? The possibilities are endless, the future looks bright, and it is an amazing time to be alive to see it all!
I mean, besides all the dumb stuff.

Rendered in Photoshop