You may have seen that NASA has recently released the first real image of a black hole.
Many people were ecstatic about it, so they made these:
NASA did the impossible and took a picture of an object that should be nearly invisible to see. This image of the black hole was loved by many, but some people were underwhelmed by it as well. Complaints about having high expectations for the image only to see a blurry low resolution smudge left many people unimpressed. While the image is a bit lackluster, the information behind the image is what is astounding about this feat. So to convince you that this is probably the coolest image of all time, I'll start off by explaining what a black hole is.
What is a Black Hole?
To simplify it, a black hole is a region of space so dense that the gravity is strong enough to absorb any material around it, including light. Once anything falls into a black hole, it cannot return.
Black holes are created when a very massive star dies and collapses in on itself. Although, there are small black holes that scientist believe have been around since the beginning of the universe.
(Source: NASA)
There are some misconceptions about black holes that have been shared in popular science, so let's debunk some of these.
1) Black Holes Don't Suck
If you really hate black holes, sure okay figuratively they can suck. In a literal sense however, black holes do not consume everything like a vacuum cleaner. In fact, if you replaced our sun with a black hole with the same mass, the planets would continue to orbit as if nothing changed. We would all freeze to death, but we would not be sucked into the black hole.
2) Galaxies Orbit Black Holes
While every galaxy we have directly observed has a super massive black hole at its center, the entire galaxy doesn't necessarily orbit the black hole. While black holes are quite massive, the gravitational influence compared to an entire galaxy isn't strong enough to assume that the galaxy is gravitationally bounded to the black hole. The stars at the center of the galaxy closest to the black hole are gravitationally bounded, but the black hole has little influence on the outer edges of galaxies.
(Source: Indie100)
Understanding the scale of black holes can be difficult to comprehend, but this video from RealLifeLore does a great job at giving visual representations.
So now that we understand black holes better, we can now understand NASA's picture. Vox does a great job at explaining the process of taking the photo . The New York Times also has a great break down of the imaging details as well.