Unprecedented photo of black hole gets meme’d to the moon
Parsec Unclick

Unprecedented photo of black hole gets meme’d to the moon

Is that a… glazed donut?

Event Horizon Telescope

Tiffany Kelly—

We knew of the existence of black holes—objects in the universe that absorb everything around them and let nothing escape, even light. But until Wednesday, we didn’t have photographic proof. This morning, astronomers released the first image of a black hole, which is centered in a galaxy known as Messier 87.

The image was captured using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a collection of eight telescopes from around the world, and shows light bending around the black hole. While the science community is thrilled, others are taking the opportunity to make memes out of this historic event.

Upon seeing this image, several people thought: “hey, this looks like a glazed donut.”

Other memes referenced films like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And the jokes took off from there.

https://twitter.com/claytonhickman/status/1116001291023671296

If the thought of this black hole swallowing everything up is terrifying to you, take comfort in the fact that it’s 55 million light-years away from our planet. But there’s still the unsettling fact that this beast is 6.5-billion times the mass of the sun. Yep. Thinking about donuts is making that information a little easier to parse.

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Tiffany Kelly

Tiffany Kelly

Tiffany Kelly is the Unclick editor at Daily Dot. Previously, she worked at Ars Technica and Wired. Her writing has appeared in several other print and online publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Popular Mechanics, and GQ.

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