First Image of a Black Hole

Origin

On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration unveiled the first direct image of a black hole at six simultaneous press conferences around the world. The subject was M87*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away and containing roughly 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. No single telescope could resolve it; instead the team linked eight radio observatories across the planet — from Hawaii to the South Pole to Spain — into an Earth-sized virtual instrument using a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry. The data ran to several petabytes, too large to send over the internet, so it had to be flown between sites on stacks of hard drives. The underlying observations were actually made back in April 2017; it then took two years and a collaboration of more than 200 scientists to turn the raw signals into the final picture. The resulting image showed a fuzzy, glowing orange ring surrounding a dark center: light bent around the shadow of the black hole itself.

What it means and how it’s used

The blurry image instantly invited comparisons. People joked that it looked like the Eye of Sauron, the wormhole Gargantua from Interstellar, a flaming donut, or simply a badly compressed JPEG. It became a reaction-and-comparison meme that celebrated a genuine milestone while gently teasing how low-resolution that first photograph turned out to be. The humor is fond rather than dismissive — marveling that humanity had photographed a black hole at all, then poking at the pixels.

How it spread

The image dominated global news within hours, and it traveled online alongside a widely shared photograph of computer scientist Katie Bouman, hands over her mouth, reacting to the reconstruction. Bouman had helped develop imaging methods (including the CHIRP algorithm) and led verification work, and the two images became linked shorthand for the achievement. She also became the target of sexist backlash that tried to credit a male colleague, who publicly defended her contribution — a controversy that only spread the story further.

Notable examples and variations

• Side-by-sides with the Eye of Sauron or Interstellar’s Gargantua.
• “Flaming donut” jokes and “worth every pixel” captions.
• A popular progressive zoom-out edit revealing the ring as the eyes of a black cat (the format shown on this page’s cover).
• A fresh wave of memes in May 2022, when the EHT released its image of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s own central black hole.

Legacy

The M87 image is one of the rare pieces of hard science news to become a beloved meme, standing as a symbol of large-scale, open collaboration — hundreds of researchers and a globe-spanning array of telescopes producing a single, slightly blurry, unforgettable orange ring.