They got an image of something, yeah.

Or, did they?

  "So we had been perfecting these imaging algorithms on synthetic data. We’d fed these algorithms made-up data. So we would take a black hole image that we might be looking at. We’d corrupt it with noise, and we’d send it through these algorithms, and we’d refine these to the point where we were pretty confident in these algorithms."

They're not really explaining this either.

I'm trying to keep an open mind but I'm still not buying the whole black hole thing.

There needs to be something more intellectually compelling than "we know it's a black hole because we know it's a black hole".

Yes, you read that right. I am doubting this religion.

  "That was a moment where there was a lot of crying and screaming."

It's not taking a photo. It's computation, based on a lot of real data, with a lot of inference and synthetic data. The idea is that it's broadly accurate but cannot capture fine detail.

The approach has been calibrated against known objects like NRAO 530, a quasar near Sgr A* that has some known properties, and it's been used on both Sgr A* and M87. And the team has admitted there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how accurate it is.

Here [1] is a pretty good article about how it works.

There's overwhelming scientific consensus that Sgr A* and M87* are black holes. It's not really provable at this point, but I don't think anyone doubts it.

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-event-horizon-telescope...