Revolutionary imaging of black hole aims to prove they are not ‘evil vacuum cleaners’

Newly appointed Cambridge professor says feat would accelerate scientific knowledge by an order of magnitude

Dark, hungry and inescapable: black holes are often portrayed as the ultimate cosmic villains.

But now astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time, in observations that could help reveal another side to these elusive – and perhaps misunderstood – space objects.