In a galaxy far, far away, there’s a place beyond the reach of science (no, not Endor), a place where the way we perceive and even think about the Universe falls apart (no, really, not Endor). I am, of course, talking about a supermassive black hole. A cosmic monster that’s crammed 6.5 billion times more matter than our Sun contains into an area so small, it doesn’t actually have spatial dimensions. The consequence of this cosmic crunch is that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull. And yet, last month, a global team of scientists announced they had managed to capture an image of this black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87. They had gathered and weaved together light that left the outer reaches of this black…
