Most likely they imaged Sagitarius A* the black hole at the center of our milky way and will present this image.
Some more info: https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-are-about-to-make-a...
Some more info: https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-are-about-to-make-a...
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-hole-photo-just-i...
And if your argument boils down to "I mean, it’s just not that aesthetically pleasing" (like the article you linked to), I don't know what to tell you.
But if people want better images of astrophysical observations they should express their support for increasing that funding accordingly. Physics needs huge, expensive, long term projects to expand our knowledge. And those projects will lead to this we can’t imagine at the outset and there will be jobs for many along the way. (Jobs for the best and the brightest and don’t boil down to getting people to buy things from advertisements.)
I’d love to see more research into expansion of the periodic table and a telescope that could utilize the suns gravitational lensing to resolve far off objects, to cherry pick a couple.
Correction, April 10, 2019: Due to an editing error, this post originally misstated that the black hole is 6.5 million times the size of the sun. It has 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun.
Correction, April 11, 2019: Due to an editing error, the post also originally misstated that the black hole was 55 million light-years old. It is 55 million light-years away.
Are these not basically the same thing ?
You do realize it's not a photo?
"...We have seen, and taken a picture, of a Black Hole."
Video at the correct time: https://youtu.be/lnJi0Jy692w?t=456
Let's not even talk about how it come up with that color, or the fact that in reality there are four different images, corresponding to the different four teams that worked with the same data, and the project then decided to publish only one, "averaged" from the four. ;-)
The image processing of any digitally taken picture involves so many corrections that these wouldn't pass such a test of "photograph" either. These either happen by choice of the photographer when developing raw images with tools like darktable, Adobe Lightroom, ... because they want to achieve a certain look - or automatically without interaction in your smartphone/DSLR if one is only interested in getting any picture or video out of the other end (remember how iPhones botched the colored sky during the California wildfires because that's something that wasn't foreseen?).
Even chemically developing images taken on photographic film gives freedom with the results.
The raw data will be published eventually.
Thanks for being interested in our data.