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These Memes & Tweets About The First Photo Of A Black Hole Are Darkly Funny
Wednesday was a big day for deep space. Scientists working with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project announced that they had succeeded in capturing a photo of a black hole for the first time ever. The picture is distinctive and shows a big reddish circle with a hole in the middle. It set off the imaginations of many on social media, and their black hole photo memes and tweets are sure to make you chuckle.
"Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe," EHT Director Sheperd Doeleman told The Guardian. "We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole." Technically, the photo shows the contours of the mass instead of the mass itself. It captures light photons entering the black hole and then being spit back out in the form of extremely hot plasma.
The project has been in the works for years: EHT began its operations in April 2017. The so-called "telescope" is actually eight telescopes placed around the globe that have been working as one. Scientists took massive amounts of data from each of the instruments and processed it into one image that's just a few kilobytes large, according to Quartz.
The single image was more than enough for social media users to riff on, though. The photo has spurred a series of memes and jokes you can check out below.
Of Course, A Brexit Joke
UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said that she will resign if her Brexit deal goes through, and speculation has already begun about who will replace her. Government officials are having a notoriously difficult time agreeing on the terms of the deal; May is hindered by the fact that her party doesn't have a majority in Parliament, according to Foreign Policy.
All this has led to a "leadership vacuum" in the United Kingdom, as the Associated Press' Danica Kirka puts it. Enter the black hole vacuum stereotype.
Grappling With The Size
This black hole is also about six billion times the mass of our sun, according to Space.com.
'Lord Of The Rings' Comparisons
CNET also suggested that the photo looked like the eye of Sauron.
Baseball Fans Chimed In
Sports analysts sometimes draw heat maps showing where pitchers tended to throw balls in relation to the strike zone, or where hitters tend to make the most frequent contact with balls. This black hole appears to have a pattern of hitting within the lower part of the zone.
An Excuse To Make Fun Of Jar Jar Binks
Jar Jar is a notoriously hated character in the Star Wars franchise.
Even A Marvel Reference
This person thinks the hole looks like an eye of Galactus.
A Little Astrology
Ah, Virgos, you efficient, meticulous beings. If a new moon in Virgo means you should launch yourself into some carefully-planned fresh starts, what does a black hole in Virgo mean?
Doughnut, Anyone?
The black hole truly looks a lot like a doughnut.
The mass shown in the photo exists in the Messier 87 galaxy, which is 55 million light-years away from Earth, according to The Guardian. That's not close enough to do any damage to our planet, but it's more than close enough to enable this miraculous image and an endless series of jokes.
