A photo of a star is cool, why not give a prize for it. Or maybe they use attention economy. You can't exactly blame them for attention economy, can you?
Photos as the only evidence of existence are a very convenient way of claming the nonexistence of something that reflects zero light. The baby-out-with-the-bathwater is that it also means there's no proof for anything outside the visible range of light, that's too small to show up on a CCD, or that predates the camera. Or you.
On the other hand, arbitrary conjecture in absence of evidence should be treated exactly as such.
It's worth noting that there are a number of phenomena for which we have built detectors to find this mysterious "dark matter", all of which have failed to turn anything up whatsoever. In fact they are less than useless in that we still don't know if any of the proposed mechanisms can even be ruled out yet. The experiments achieved basically zero information gain in that regard.
Occam's razor flashes bright in the cold dark of space.
