Last night I was lucky enough to catch this picture of the nearest black hole known as V404 Cygni. The reason the entity is visible in this photo is thanks to Hawking radiation, invented by the well known Stephen Hawking. Before his theory about energy emission in black holes, these massive creatures were unphotographable. Luckily, we have this great man in the world, and if he continues his studies the way he has been up to this point, he might invent aliens some time soon.
The ring you see around the black hole is an effect of gravitational lensing. It turns out that there is a galaxy situated right behind the black hole that I saw with my own eyes. I couldn’t tell you which galaxy it is, because they all look the same. The light from the galaxy is traveling in all directions at the speed of light, and some of it is pulled in by the black hole and disintegrated, or maybe it disappears, or turns into solid matter because of insanely high gravitational energy, no one really knows. Some say that anything that goes into a black hole turns into its own universe. I guess hawking proved that this would be a glitchy universe. Matter would keep disappearing in the form of photon beans.
The light that is not sucked into the black hole is still affected by the black hole’s gravity. If the effect is just right, like knifes edge, then the light will be pulled just enough to be redirected straight into our eyes. Do you realize how exact it has to be for this to happen? It’s like life on earth and all that drama. Luckily, the effect of gravity is gradient and not sporadic or arbitrary. These words don’t mean anything except that there will always be a spot, somewhere (reasonably speaking) where the light is far enough but not too far away from the black hole, and far enough but not too far away from our eyeholes, so that it is pulled just enough but not too much so that it enters our eyeholes. There. That explains the ring in the photo.
glistener 