April 10 in History

In April 1815, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia, erupted with a force unmatched in recorded history. The blast killed tens of thousands of people nearby, and the volcanic material it threw into the atmosphere cooled the global climate for a year or more. The summer of 1816, known in Europe and North America as the "Year Without Summer," brought crop failures and hunger far from the volcano itself.

The Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, was a political settlement reached in April 1998 that largely ended the violent conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Signed by the British and Irish governments and endorsed by most of Northern Ireland's main parties, it created a framework for shared government and a route to peace after some three decades of bombings, shootings and communal fear that cost roughly 3,500 lives.

In April 2019, an international collaboration of astronomers released the first direct image of a black hole: a glowing, lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark central patch at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The picture, produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), offered strong visual confirmation of a prediction made by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity more than a century earlier, and it marked a milestone in how humans observe the universe.