A man was viewing artist Anish Kapoor's work in a Portuguese museum on Aug. 13 when he accidentally descended into "Descent Into Limbo," an art installation that is a pit painted black.

The first ever image of a black hole some 55 million light-years away from Earth has sparked the imagination of astronomers, astrophysicists and political cartoonists.

The photo, which shows an oval-shaped void surrounded by a bright ring of glowing gas, is only the second image captured of a black hole. IE 11 is not supported.

Black holes are a fixture of science fiction -- whether it's the time-warping regions of space seen in the 2014 movie Interstellar to the all-consuming planet destroyers of Star Trek.

While black holes can pour out enormous amounts of energy into their jets — more than 100 galaxies’ worth of stars — it takes hundreds ... but two-thirds of the way into the cosmic void, ...

An artist's depiction of VCC128 shows a massive black hole (black dot) at the center of a stellar envelope. A ring of stars, which appears as a double nucleus, surrounds the black hole.