Why Does The Black Hole Photo Appear As A SpaghettiO?

Our Milky Way galaxy is circling the cosmic drain. There is a vast, inescapable void at its center, which is devouring all matter and energy in its path - aka a black hole.

According to astronomers, in fact, all galaxies circle these voids, but no one has witnessed one till today. On April 10, an international scientist team released a photo of an enormous active black hole. It is located in a galaxy called Messier 87 (55 mil light years from Earth) and is 6.5 billion times the Sun’s size.

The photo is beautiful and strange, however, why is it similar to a SpaghettiO?

First, remember that the image we saw today is the first direct photo of a black hole, but it's not what Earthlings already know. The project called the Event Horizon Telescope focused on the stars and collected radio data in order to build a photo of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy.

What these scientists recorded is, in fact, what's called the “shadow” of the black hole. The hole is so thick that it can warp time and space surrounding it, which consumes nearby light. Fundamentally, a black hole is a light absence, so it is impossible to observe with traditional devices.

But, each black hole is surrounded by an "event horizon", where light cannot escape its maw. Being located outside the horizon is the ‘accretion disk’ which creates a superhot chaotic energy and matter swirl that slips into the black hole, or else, be ejected into space.

In this ring of matter, photons eddy around the black hole’s edges, which is a void emitting no light. This is what the EHT captured.

Heino Falcke, head of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council, said in a media release.

Therefore, what we see is not actually a black hole, but rather spacetime distortion it leaves in the wake, which considers it is the first glimpse of an Albert Einstein-theorized phenomenon a hundred years ago.

The NSF said in a clip that explains about the phenomenon:

Traces from doomed photons sought their road to the Earth, despite 55 mil light years away.