Here's how scientists will take the first-ever photograph of a black hole

You've probably seen a handful of amazing black hole images on the internet, like the one below. Or perhaps you've seen this illustration, which shows the immense mass of a black hole warping the space around it into a gravitational lens: And here's a view of a black hole belching particles near the speed of light -- also called relativistic jet or "blazar": No matter how awe-inspiring these images are, though, they're fantasy. We have no idea how the event horizon (or boundary) of a black hole might actually look to the human eye, since the gravity of black holes is so strong that not even light can escape. Black holes are also incredibly far away, and usually very compact. And we don't really know what happens as an object approaches an event horizon, or what, if anything, might be on the other side.