Photo of a Black Hole

What the image shows

The image has a dark background and a bright ring in orange and yellow. Brightness is distributed unevenly: the lower arc is noticeably brighter than the upper one, and inside the ring is a dark area without light. The edges of the ring are blurred, so the outline looks soft rather than sharp.

This is not a photograph in visible light but an image assembled from radio data. The colors are conventional: they show the distribution of brightness, not the object's real color. In memes, the dark center is most often taken for a “hole,” although in fact it is a region where light does not reach the observer.

How this image came about

The data for the image were collected in April 2017, and processing took about two years. The result was announced on April 10, 2019, at press conferences in several countries, and the scientific papers appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Event Horizon Telescope project involved radio telescopes at different points around the world that operated as a single giant instrument. The object is about 55 million light-years from Earth (different publications give values of roughly 53 to 55 million), and the black hole's mass is estimated at about 6.5 billion solar masses.

What the internet saw in the ring

After publication, social media produced many variants. The most common comparisons are to the Eye of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings,” a donut or bagel, and a cat's eye. People looked for a familiar shape in the ring and substituted it for a scientific explanation.

Some memes were built on ready-made templates: the image was used as a reaction to a surprise or inserted into familiar joke formats. Such remakes relied on recognizing the shape, not on any knowledge of astronomy.

Examples of captions for the ring

Example one: “Coffee after the third cup: looks like a drink, but it's empty inside.” The caption carries the emptiness of the ring's center over to an everyday situation, and the point is clear at once.

Example two: “When someone in the group chat asks who's coming, and silence.” The bright edge and empty center become a metaphor for waiting. The reader recognizes the situation from the shape of the frame.

Example three: “A donut someone forgot to sprinkle with sugar.” The comparison to an object works through a familiar shape, and the joke reduces to a small everyday mishap.

Such captions work because they link two images: a bright halo and the emptiness inside. The more precisely the caption describes this pair, the shorter and funnier the text turns out.

Where this image fits

The picture suits topics about space, science, unexpected discoveries, and emptiness in a figurative sense. If it is used in a serious context, it helps to give the publication date and the type of observation, so as not to confuse a radio image with an ordinary photograph.

Contrast works well for jokes: a scientific object next to a plain everyday comparison. The image is especially handy for memes about disappointed expectations: at first glance the viewer expects something sharp and sees a blurred ring. To keep the joke from becoming repetitive, it is worth choosing one comparison and developing it into a specific everyday detail.