This GIF is a testament to the amazing power of black holes. The image of M87 shows what a black hole’s event horizon looks like. The European Southern Observatory published this 20-year time-lapse of stars near the center of our galaxy in 2018. Stars orbiting the black hole in the center of our galaxy

It’s a truly remarkable moment for humans to be able to see something so enigmatic, so far away, and so incredibly difficult to capture. The absence in the image means something has left our observable universe. The light in the center gets sucked out of our view irretrievably. Within that photon orbit is the event horizon, the region beyond which no light can escape.Īs you look at this image, know that this isn’t an object. That light encircles the photon orbit, a region beyond which light could conceivably escape from but is unlikely to. In the image, the visible reddish and white light surrounding the black hole is material being destroyed by its immense gravity. The black hole, called M87, is massive, some 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, all contained in a single point of infinite density. The supermassive black hole is at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, 53.49 million light-years away. In April 2019, an international collaboration of scientists called the Event Horizon Telescope told the world that, for the first time, humanity has peered into the edge of a black hole. The first image of a black hole was published in April 2019. Jaw-dropping images of Jupiter, sent back by Juno Pluto may be a dwarf planet, but it’s an entire world. The preceding photo shows what Pluto looks like this one helps us understand what it would be like to be there, on the surface. It shows 11,000 foot tall mountains and icy planes, and you can even see tiny wisps of Pluto’s extremely thin atmosphere in arch-shaped lines above the surface. It’s a close-up view of Pluto’s surface captured just 15 minutes after New Horizon’s closest approach to the planet. Here’s another image from the New Horizons mission, and my favorite. What it’s like on the surface of Pluto NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute This image, and others like it, instantly became iconic, and a testament to the discoveries that can be made by exploration. The image above is the highest-resolution image from the New Horizons mission, which was launched in 2006, and arrived at Pluto in 2015. Astronomers even speculate there may be a dynamic, slushy sea underneath Pluto’s heart-shaped basin. Its mostly smooth surface suggests its crust has been constantly reshaping itself, erasing impact craters. When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July 2015, it revealed that Pluto wasn’t just some boring ball of rock and ice at the end of the solar system. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Instituteīefore 2015, the very best image of the dwarf planet Pluto was smudgy and blurry, and didn’t reveal a whole lot about the composition of this little world more than 3 billion miles from Earth. Pluto’s iconic heart-shaped basin, captured in July 2015. An up-close view of Pluto showed that even dwarf planets can be beautiful, geologically-rich worlds There’s the first-ever view of the surface of Pluto, an up-close encounter with a comet, and an entire solar system photographed in its infancy. Others are awe inspiring for the engineering achievements they represent, and give hope for what’s possible in the future. Some of these images are awe inspiring for their beauty, or their remoteness, or for helping us understand our tiny place in the universe. We put together our favorite astronomy images and videos from the 2010s, in no particular order. They showed us images never seen before, like the first-ever image of a black hole, which was just declared to be Science’s “ breakthrough of the year.” Meanwhile, our telescopes peered deeper into the cosmos. Humans sent robots to the farthest reaches of the solar system, to the sun, to the gas giant Jupiter, and more. The field of astronomy this decade delivered an embarrassment of riches: stunning accomplishment after stunning accomplishment from the exploration of space.

Space phenomena names