The depicted black hole is not a copy-pasted, modified image: it was created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and based on the original image that made history on 10 April 2019.
That image mesmerised me – like millions on the planet. I kept on thinking about that behemoth at the heart of galaxy Messier 87 (M87) long after its portrait was released. This is my way of commemorating that unique moment of literally universal insight and of paying homage to the people who worked together to make that technical feat possible.
The supermassive black hole in M87, or rather the stellar material that spirals inexorably into its field of gravity, was captured by eight finely co-ordinated radio telescopes that together formed the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
Galaxy M87 is 55 million light-years away from earth and the supermassive hole at its centre is an unfathomable 6.5 billion times as big as our Sun. The name of this equally supermassive telescope – Event Horizon – describes the ultimate point that anything within a black hole's gravitational pull can reach in recognisable form, before being sucked into the black hole forever. You can read more on the EHT project here.
© Artemis Gause 2019. On GitHub: MissArray.