Albert Einstein would have been pleased, but maybe also a bit surprised, by today's announcement of the first ever close-up image of a supermassive black hole. Early speculation about black holes fell straight from Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity, but the great scientist himself thought the idea was a little too weird to manifest itself in the actual universe.

He assumed it was an artifact of the mathematics, said physicist Daniel Kennefick, co-author of An Einstein Encyclopedia and the upcoming No Shadow of Doubt.

Bloomberg