Big news first: Astronomers have taken the first-ever picture of a black hole: “At six simultaneous press conferences around the globe, astronomers on Wednesday announced they had accomplished the seemingly impossible: taking a picture of a black hole, a cosmic monster so voracious that light itself cannot escape its clutches. This historic feat, performed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a planet-spanning network of radio observatories—required more than a decade of effort.” Here’s the image. And here’s the story behind the photo: “Technically, this is a picture of the shadow of a black hole: specifically, a supermassive black hole—a 6.5-billion-solar-mass beast 55 million light years from Earth—at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. Black holes trap everything that falls in, including light, which is why they are black. In a sense, they are fundamentally unseeable, one-way cosmic escape hatches leading to … well, that part is unclear. But because of the way they warp spacetime, they impose a dark silhouette on the glowing, superheated matter that circles them. This is the barely imaginable scene the EHT captured during an observing run two years ago, and revealed to the world today. Since the 1960s, when indirect astronomical evidence and breakthroughs in theoretical physics made the existence of black holes all but undeniable, these objects have been in a sort of epistemological limbo: they were the most likely explanation for all sorts of otherwise inexplicable phenomena, but no one held out much hope of ever seeing one.”

More news: Julian Assange has been arrested in London.

Remember the fire that destroyed Brazil’s National Museum last year? Investigators have discovered what caused it: An improperly installed AC unit.

Dan Robbins, the “paint-by-number” inventor, has died. He was at 93.

A couple of items on the ever green (or should that be ever yellow) Vincent van Gogh: A major retrospective of Van Gogh’s work and writing opens in Houston: “Van Gogh’s writing dovetailed with his work, as the catalogue for the exhibition extensively notes. Of the color yellow, a recurring and almost spiritual presence in his work, the artist wrote: ‘Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow—pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is!’” The gun that may have been used (by himself or someone else) to kill the artist goes on the block in June. “As reported by the Associated Press, a 7mm pocket revolver found in a field in the northern French village of Auvers-sur-Oise — where Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890 — will go up for auction in Paris at the Drouot auction center.”

Sir Roger Scruton has been removed from his role on the “Building Better, Building Beautiful” commission in the British government because he has supposedly revealed himself to be an anti-Semite, racist, and Islamophobe in an interview at The New Statesman. Michael Brendan Dougherty and Dominic Green take issue with the dishonest editing at the magazine. Rod Dreher has more here.

Essay of the Day:

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Vasquez and Dan Bauman write about how college closures affect students:

“All across the United States, colleges are disappearing. As a result, the lives of students and their families have been plunged into unexpected crisis. A Chronicle analysis of federal data shows that, in the last five years, about half a million students have been displaced by college closures, which together shuttered more than 1,200 campuses.

“That’s an average of 20 campus closures per month. Many of those affected are working adults living paycheck to paycheck, who carried hopes that college would be their path to the middle class. Most are age 25 or older. About one in four are at least 35 years old.

“‘ONE class left,’ Lisa La More wrote on Facebook last month, after the for-profit college she attended, the Art Institute of California’s San Diego campus, shut down. ‘Less than 3 weeks from my BS in Graphic and Web. 6 years of my life WASTED. I am 48 years old, with teenage kids. What am I supposed to do now?’

“College closures don’t just disproportionately hurt older students. They have severely hit low-income students, too: Nearly 70 percent of undergraduates at closed campuses received need-based Pell Grants. Black and Hispanic students also bear the brunt. About 57 percent of displaced students are racial minorities.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Mount Fanjing

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