Supermassive Black Hole Silhouette

A close-up image of the M87 galaxy core and the supermassive black hole at its center (Image: NASA).

On April 10, 2019, the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole's silhouette was captured and presented by a team of international astronomers. The network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) set out to obtain an image of a black hole using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This image depicts the center of the galaxy M87, 53 million light-years away with a noticeable dark spot at its core.

The Milky Way Domain

The acclaimed work by Nick Risinger, Photopic Sky Survey, can be admired here as a marvelous 360-degree photomosaic of the Universe joined together in 2011, and it portrays a boundless continuum of stars and galaxies, each one regularly visible to the naked eye on a really clear night. Begin the simulated arena looking towards the galactic center of the Milky Way, and every direction you go expands the background into a gorgeous panorama with rich interstellar details that appear to make the screen look replete with starry objects. It is honestly quite entertaining just to move around some particular region and then gain a better perspective back from planet Earth, the vantage point looking free through the atmosphere, set aside from the Sun and the Moon. A few major identifiable celestial objects include the Pleiades (M45), Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the Orion Nebula (M42), and they can easily be spotted in this 37,440-exposure, 5000-megapixel shot. The image provides an alluring insight into the breathtaking cosmic matter radiating light from the galactic realm of the Milky Way and space within the Virgo supercluster of the observable universe.


Andromeda (M31) is shown here as it is Milky Way's closest spiral galaxy neighbor (Image: NASA).

Innumerable Galaxies

From September 2003 to January 2004, the NASA Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a region of space with a low brightness and only a few stars in the near field. The region was about the size of a grain of sand at a distance of one meter away from the human eye. With all of the data accumulated during that time, the telescope captured an image that exemplifies just how immense the universe really is.


"Humankind's deepest portrait of the visible universe ever" as referred to by NASA (Image: NASA).

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is considered to be one of the most humbling and profound images of all time. The countless number of individual galaxies revealed is not only surprising but also very informative. An image like this makes the universe look like it is truly abundant with other galaxies and stars. It is also interesting to note that the light from the farthest galaxies in this picture has been traveling towards us since early after the Big Bang and represents what those galaxies looked like about 13 billion years ago. This information has enabled a base measurement of early galaxies' distribution and their evolution.

Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to be up and running in 2018.