In a landmark day for science and astronomy, the first ever image of a real-life black hole, one located in a galaxy known as M87, was released by a team of worldwide scientists.
It may look like it was taken on a flip phone, but when you consider that this image is 55 million light years away, it’s actually kind of insane that we’re looking at anything at all.
This is truly one of the most impressive feats in astronomy and photography in all of human history, but after getting over my awe of seeing something like this for the first time, I remembered that I’ve seen a Black Hole already before… at least in Mass Effect 2 I did.
Both gaming and Hollywood with the film Interstellar have done a pretty decent job of depicting something that by its nature, is unseeable without the help of the stuff orbiting it marking where it is. Using scientific descriptions of what it would look like to create something that’s pretty on the nose is quite impressive.
Honestly not too shabby right? The black holes in both pictures are void of any color. The bright orange ring you see around it is what is called the accretion disk, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a rotating disc of stuff that got captured by this massive dark object that is so powerful that even light will get sucked in.
There’s no way of escaping a black hole, at least no way that scientists are aware of. Yet even with the photo and all the work/research that went into producing it, there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes including what is on the other end of it.
We’ll have to wait until we get images of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our galaxy before we possibly confirm the existence of a collector base or perhaps the “Reapers.”
