Astronomers looking for black holes have long known that the deck is stacked against them. In order to find a heavenly body, sky gazers ordinarily take a straightforward approach, hoping simply to eyeball the object through a telescope. But black holes, which are formed by collapsed stars or compressed matter at the center of galaxies, are so dense that nothing--not even light--can escape their gravity. Last week, however, investigators at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., announced that they had at last seen direct evidence of a black hole in action.
Until now, the best clues to the existence...
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