"a person would be capable of reading a text message on a phone in New York while standing on a street in Paris. "
See? They admit that the earth is flat!

Calling this a "direct image" is simply wrong. It took data from dozens of different radio antennas all across the planet and had to go through enormous super-computer processing to get that image.

Something is wrong with the resolution number of 20 arc seconds. The resolution of the well corrected human eye is 300 arc seconds. The Moon is 1800 arc seconds. The resolution of an 8 in. telescope is .58 arc seconds. The resolution of an Earth diameter telescope is the inverse of 2 x 10**8 meters/.2 meters times .58 arc second or 6 x 10**-10 arc seconds.

First direct images of area near supermassive black hole released. I fixed the title for you. We may never be able to see a black hole because nothing leaves a black hole. The area around a black may be imaged, but never the black hole itself. Am I being too pedantic or was this just an oversight on the astronomers who brought us these images?

Should be called black mass; holes get bigger the more you take away - black holes get bigger the more they eat up; also if a BH is all about density - well - a hole has none so....should be called a black mass.

can this technique directly image extra-solar planets?

Funnily enough, I've got a lot of photos like that on my phone, but mainly caused by having my thumb in the wrong place!

So basically the telescopes being separated gives us a virtual lens size the size of the separation.
Shouldn't it be possible to produce a really large virtual lens by using geostationary satellites?

I wonder why they didn't use the black hole at the centre of our Universe; it's a lot closer. I'm sure there's a reason. @ Douglas Bennett Rogers... it's not 20 arc seconds it's 20 arc MICROseconds

I'm amused and impressed with the insights of the posters. We now have so-called visual proof of its existence, and fancy graphics, lots of hypotheses, but no actual image of the action of celestial bodies getting swallowed up by this gargantuan space phenomena. I'm not a physicist, but I still fail to see what a black hole (mass?) has anything to do with Einstein's theory of relativity. There's so much scientific prognostication attributed to him that I've begun to question their validity. How in the world did a man who lived til the mid 50's ever conceive of black holes? On top of that, there are many scientists who've declared him a fake or a plagiarist. Nonetheless, the whole thing is definitely fascinating, even if it might be science fiction.