How Twitter robbed us of wonder

Black holes are awesome. Twitter turned them into a joke.

The black hole.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP, Twitter)

Black holes are remarkable celestial phenomena. They are so massive and dense that nothing — not even light itself — can escape their gravitational pull. And now, for the very first time, we have a picture of one.

After two years of analyzing and parsing data from the eight Event Horizon telescopes, scientists this week revealed an image of the event horizon surrounding a black hole in a nearby galaxy. The project was made possible in part by Katie Bouman, an MIT scientist who is just 29 years old, and who helped create the sophisticated algorithms that put together the image from all that data.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Navneet Alang

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based out of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt.