The M87 Black Hole in Context

Last week we looked at the amazing news that astronomers had finally photographed a black hole. Or, technically, the shadow of a black hole since the black hole itself cannot be seen. I want to return to that news, because it’s awesome. And because xkcd published a piece that annotated the image to show the size of things by comparison.

I had mentioned that it was a supermassive black hole, some of the biggest of the bigs. And M87 is a beast.

Voyager 1 is barely at the event horizon…
Voyager 1 is barely at the event horizon…

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.