I can’t tell you how underwhelmed I am by the newly released photo of an honest to god galactic black hole — the first-ever snapshot of one of these largely invisible yet still whoa-awesome mega-vacuums.
“It’s like the universe had a royal baby: That’s how excited everyone is for this first glimpse of a black hole,” writes Slate.
My interest in royal progeny or anything about the Royal Family is several notches below my interest in macramé and pulling weeds, so right there we have a faulty analogy.
I like stars and planets, the sun and galaxies and Chewbacca, but I’m a solar system sourpuss on this one. I don’t frown upon astronomers finally clicking a picture of a black hole — “an abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it” — it’s just not emotional rocket fuel. It elicits a cosmic shrug. I was expecting explosions and ecstasy.
“The image is based on data from radio telescopes all over the world,” Slate says, “so it’s not technically even a picture of a black hole. It’s really confusing that everyone’s acting like we have a picture of one. This is actually a composite that shows the shadow of a black hole.”
Here is the image, released today by astronomers:
“A composite that shows the shadow of a black hole”? Maybe you can see why there’s disappointment amid the jazzed gawping. Not only is it not an actual black hole, but the photo really isn’t so hot. Blurry, amorphous, rather dull. Like a toddler accidentally took a picture of a lightbulb with his mom’s lame Android phone.
Some liken it to an orange donut, the bagel emoji, or a SpaghettiO — a junk-food fest. Others, like the New York Times, wax poetic, declaring the black hole, “55 million light-years away from Earth, resembling the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the implacable power of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.”
Deep. And quite lovely.
But really now, this is a black hole:
This is the black hole of our dreams and nightmares, the yawning, all-devouring abyss of a crappy 1979 Disney fantasy titled, aptly, “The Black Hole,” the cosmos’ most grandiosely epic sucker-upper, a whirling, phosphorescent monster maw, God’s unblinking eye, or the fiery, furious, inflexibly unforgiving gateway to Hell. It is glorious and mad, beautiful on a mind-altering scale, a spinning top dancing on the lip of the great beyond.
But it is also just a NASA illustration, a dazzling graphic vibrating with the curiosity and imagination of good speculative sci-fi. No one knows what a black hole really looks like, even after the new fuzzy photo. I’d love to see a crisp, clear portrait of one of those galactic phenomena that sucks up everything in its path. Alas, today’s picture just sucks.
GNASHING. 