Delightfulskywalker - 🥀

Yet our Sun is only one of the fixed stars, of which the most up-to-date astronomical methods estimate there are one hundred and twenty-five millions. Around each of these fixed stars undoubtedly revolves a Planetary System like our own. Thus reckoned, there are one thousand million Worlds. Even this is not the limit. If we should stand upon the farthest and dimmest star, we should, no doubt, from there see as many more beyond. We are appalled at the greatness of the Universe.

A Trip To The Planets (1925)

Father and daughter

leave me alone

Han Solo in a nutshell

Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As the size of a black hole’s event horizon is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.  The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.

Credit: ESO

I C O N I C

[slides nasa $20] so, tell me about the aliens