Black holes are the undisputed titans of the cosmos. These collapsed stars are so dense and massive that not even light can escape their gravitational clutches, rendering them invisible.

Fear not: we can now “see the unseeable”, according to the astronomers who on Wednesday unveiled the first photograph of a black hole and its surroundings. It does, admittedly, look like a doughnut: a circle of blackness ringed by fuzzy, bright light. The image of the supermassive black hole, which is 6bn times more massive than our sun and lies 53m light years away in the Messier 87 galaxy, was captured in fragments by a global network of high-altitude land-based telescopes and then pieced together.

While the confirmation burnishes Albert Einstein’s legacy — it vindicates his general theory of relativity, even though he did not believe such objects existed — it should also inspire admiration for John Michell, an 18th-century English rector who theorised the existence of “dark stars” before Einstein was born. Michell is the often forgotten first link in a chain of scientists who have applied their extraordinary minds to the bizarre implications of these extreme objects. So extreme that, for example, a person falling into a black hole would undergo “spaghettification”, or extraordinary stretching due to the immense gravitational pull.