A blurry mugshot of a dense cosmic sucker

Many eyes squinted instead of becoming goggle-eyed with awe when they first rested upon an image of a mammoth cosmic blackness into which all light and matter disappear, never to be heard from again. 

Is that what a black hole looks like, a misshapen bagel on fire? That’s literally nothing to write home about. Over 200 genii working to fructify an idea conceived over a quarter century ago, eight perfectly synced telescopes positioned at the most exotic vacation spots on the planet gazing, unblinking, into space for 10 days, and together they end up snapping the cosmic backwater for a picture so... out of focus!

And it’s not even our black hole, lodged as it is in the centre of the nearby galaxy, Messier 87. Forty million pounds of hard-fought earth money down an extraterrestrial drain, and for what? For a shot of the neighbour’s black hole. Frankly, Musk’s Starman cut a better figure coasting in a Tesla against the radiant blue horizon of the Earth. 

The anthropoid response to this other-world entity was akin to the collective hoot of a disappointed fan base when a sci-fi thriller contains averagely impressive visual effects and much bathos.

For many reasons, however, critics are a bit out of place, and time, to malign the mugshot of the cosmic sucker. Though it should be said, black holes don’t suction, nor are they empty as the name suggests, and the mugshot is the most sophisticated composite portrait ever assembled (Don’t they tell it like it is in astrophysics!). Some wonder, then, can be drawn back out of this space-time mess. 

What was unveiled on April 10 was the result of an attempt to photograph Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. And the neighbour’s black hole photo-bombed it. No, let’s just say Mr Bagel was more photogenic.

Mr Bagel sits slurping light and whatever stuff there is at the inhuman distance of 500 million trillion km, in the north of constellation Virgo (in case you were planning to drive, which might be difficult as M87 does not have spiral dust lanes like our prettier Milky Way). To see it, you really have to strain, with eyes as large as the Earth. This was made possible by the array of telescopes — set up atop volcanoes, mountains and deserts — which together functioned as a giant global eye stalking Mr Bagel.

In plain speak, Mr Bagel is old, extremely tiny for how fat he is, and quite radioactive. He has been around for more than 13 billion years, has a mass of 6.5 billion of our suns, yet is so small he has no known height or girth. Also, he is dark.

Imagine these stunning circumstances as a sharp pencil dot on this broadsheet page. The dot is the black hole, the page is the event horizon — the photo’s shadowy region — and the room the sloppy halo of fire around it. Now imagine taking a picture of the dot from your friend’s house who lives in the next city. At night, without flash. (Apocryphal parallels, but they will do for perspective.) 

Thankfully, the dot emits radio waves. And the genii figured out a way to create an eyeball big enough to peer at the shadow of the lightless pinprick.  

To get this one look, data equivalent to the lifetime selfie collections of 40,000 people was generated and crunched. Too vast to be transferred online, it was transported physically, in hard drives, from the telescopic sites, one of which was Antarctica from where it took six months to get to civilisation. So ten days from the black hole to Earth and 180 days from a pole of the earth to the centre. The portrait of Mr Bagel was thus assembled. And when it was unveiled, the black hole, true to the legend, sucked in all earthly attention. Cosmic irony. So, forgive him for not being as sharp as an Instagram selfie. If there could be a repartee from him, it should read, ‘Don’t judge me with your short-sighted glasses, rock dwellers. There is more to me than meets the eye.”