As I’m sure most everyone has seen, a few days ago on April 10th the first photo ever of a Black Hole was released. An object that in effect should be impossible to visualize was captured, thanks to a lucky arrangement of the gasses surrounding the object.
The entire story on just how it was captured is kind of amazing — I won’t go into it here, as I’m trying to avoid going into crazy detail on things like I used to. What I will say is, while I found the picture awesome, I didn’t go out of my way to read up on it – I’ve been busy anyway.
Last night while scouring YouTube before bed, I saw a video on the black hole photo which had a thumbnail that really caught my attention due to 3 characters on it.
M87
Messier Catalog Object 87, a supermassive elliptical galaxy some 53 million light years away, has a known active supermassive black hole at its core. I’ve known about this since I was, oh, probably 7 years old, and it’s always been my favorite “thing” in the universe. With jets of matter shooting out of it at nearly light speed, a black hole core (which is now thought to be common with most galaxies) and the galaxy itself being quite massive and rather ancient (as galaxies merge they tend to become elliptical blobs rather than nice spirals like the Milky Way is) it just caught my attention like nothing else really did.
As you can imagine, that black hole photo isn’t just any random one – it’s the core of that very galaxy.
So, basically, that means that the photo is of my favorite object in the universe, and for 3 days I somehow managed to not see or hear the fact that it is M87 a single time! This goes to show how much I avoid “news” these days, as it’s almost all hype and very little information.
It’s really nice, though, not just that we have an image of a black hole, but for it to be that one which, while as large as the appreciable part of our solar system, is still so far away that from Earth it’s incredibly small.
Apparently there has also been an image taken of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, but at this time that image has yet to be released. That will be equally awesome to see, given that our solar system is orbiting that very black hole (in principle, if not in effective practice) as it moves with and through the galaxy
Anyway, here’s a wiki link and the video I spoke of that I saw last night
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87
Really, this is amazing. I just wish the news media was more like it was 50 years ago in reporting things and that “hype culture” didn’t exist. It ruins everything…