NewsJason Matterblack hole, black hole picture, black hole image, black hole new york times, black hole NYT, black hole revealedComment

Black Hole Picture Revealed

NewsJason Matterblack hole, black hole picture, black hole image, black hole new york times, black hole NYT, black hole revealedComment
Black Hole Picture Revealed

Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.

The first image of a black hole, from the galaxy Messier 87. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, via National Science Foundation

The first image of a black hole, from the galaxy Messier 87. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, via National Science Foundation

“We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity