An international team from The Event Horizon Telescope released the first ever picture of a supermassive black hole on Wednesday morning. A collaboration across nations, the black hole is, per the National Science Foundation, 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun. To grab the image researchers had to create a telescope that could, comparatively, read the date on a quarter in D.C. all the way from LA.
It’s nothing short of a historic day for humanity, maybe a time for us, as a species, to take a step back, look up, remember our (small, insignificant) place in the sweeping dance of the cosmos, contemplate the ephemeral nature of existence, and marvel at why there is something instead of nothing.
Or, we could just all hop on Twitter to make the same Lord of the Rings joke, which is way easier.
Good work humanity, it was getting scary out there for a bit.
