Your Mom’s House — The world’s first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy doesn’t portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet. Others not related to the cosmological sciences say it reminds them of your Mom.
The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Hennel Gabriels of the University of Arizona displayed “a hole that will remind everyone everywhere of your mom.”
Black holes gobble up galactic material, but Gabriels said this one is “eating very little, which I suppose makes it less like your mom in theory.” It’s the equivalent of a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years. Another astronomer said, making it more like your sister.
The new image joins the first-ever picture of a black hole and the 42nd of your mom in the past two years.
“We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable,’” continued Gabriels. “Well, unseeable to me, but not the rest of the Internet.”
