(The whole black hole)
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Ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of however many genders we have this week, it looks like science has done it again. Earth’s EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) has produced the first-ever photo of a black hole!
Oddly enough, it’s shaped like a hole. Guess what color it is.
To capture the photograph, the EHT focused on the center of some galaxy known as Messier 87 (M87), so I suppose somewhere out there, there are at least 86 other Messier galaxies. That’s like one per gender.
Astrohistorical-type Sidebar: Messier 87 was named for (or maybe by) a French astronomer called Charles Messier, and based on my experience with that sneaky French language, it’s probably pronounced mee-Zhwoh. Messier is best known for surrendering to a 60’s band named the Fifth Dimension while they were singing “The Age of Aquarius.” He also published a catalog of nebulae, which explains why you’ve never heard of him. Chuck M named his opus Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles (French for “here’s some, like, Nebulae and stuff”), but the masterwork received very few positive reviews, given that he wrote it some 250 years before amazon.com’s founder cheated on his wife and suddenly became the half-richest man on Earth.
By now, I’m sure you’ve seen one of the official photographs of the black hole, or one of the official artist renderings of the black hole, or one of the unofficial photoshopped images of a teenager snapping a quick selfie just before getting sucked into a black hole while texting and driving. The photograph is stunning, all the more so because it’s a picture of something that happened 75 million years ago, around the time that Justice Ginsberg graduated from law school. Because M87 is so far away, it takes light that many years to get here, as if light were a Domino’s pizza.
To put that into perspective, it takes light from our own star eight minutes and twenty seconds to arrive, and if I could get pizza delivered that fast, I’d never leave my house.
Actually, this thing that astronomy-types call the Event Horizon Telescope is not just one single steroided-up telescope; in fact, the EHT is many many telescopes positioned all over the planet, like rocks, or Starbucks. The EHT utilizes a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, leading us to think that astronomy-types get paid by the syllable.
Since its first successful data capture in 2006, the EHT array has boasted a proud record of interferometricating, though there was one snag when it attempted to photograph the Milky Way’s black hole, because they forgot that the South Pole telescope is closed during winter.
The South Pole telescope is closed during winter. I am not good enough to make this stuff up.
So, to kill some time while you’re off cancelling that ill-timed South Pole vaycay, let’s learn something: what then, exactly, is a black hole? According to the internet … yeah, I know … a black hole is a region of space that has a gravitational field so intense that nothing can escape from it except for Barack Obama’s ego, and Justin Bieber albums. (Technically speaking, the Bieber albums didn’t escape from the black hole; they were rejected. There are some things even a black hole won’t ingest.)
This particular black hole at the center of M87 is also absolutely monstrous. Astro-junkies posit its event horizon is so big that it could easily hold our entire solar system, or two of Hillary’s pantsuits. (Event Horizon is a wireless provider with black-hole-sized pricing plans, but offering less coverage)
Earth’s astro-brains additionally suggest that the black hole’s mass is 6.5 ± 0.7 billion solar masses, conservatively, though there’s really no need to drag conservatives into this. (And what the heck ‘±’ stands for is beyond our guess.) One “solar mass,” of course, represents the average amount of time one spends at a Catholic church service. Except in Rome on the Pope’s birthday.
On those special days, the time-null Catholic service is known as a “black holy.”
Bring a sandwich.