Eye of Sauron

"The eye of Sauron."

That is how the New York Times today described the black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy in the constellation Virgo.  The black hole, so dense that no light can escape from the region beneath its "event horizon," has a radius of 60,000 light years.  (Our own Milky Way galaxy, by comparison, is "only" 100,000 light years in diameter.)  The black hole has the mass of 6.5 billion of our Suns, all collapsed in on itself from its own gravity.

This photo was taken on April 10, 2017.  It was the first photo of a black hole.

The Times article discusses the fact that the black hole actually has rings around it.  The article, unfortunately, devotes most of its space to background information about the nature of black holes, and to a description of the system of eight radio observatories that together constitute the Event Horizon Telescope that photographed the black hole -- and not so much to the nature of the rings.  In fact, it offers three schematic diagrams of the rings in space-time, without any explanation of what the details of the diagrams represent.

But the article does offer one dramatic description of the source of light in the rings:

When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don't just see the swirling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in.  You can also see the whole universe.  Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope.

The writer later explains that we  not only see light from all over the universe, we are in effect looking further and further back into the history of the universe.

To be fair, the article's writer appears to be primarily interested in showing the importance of the Event Horizon Telescope, a joint international effort by observatories around the world.  I would have liked a clearer explanation of how the black hole is believed to collect light from the entire universe and throw it into orbit about itself, however, and how the light reaches us by eventually escaping the clutches of the black hole. But details such as that may simply not be available at this time. 

A good reason to subscribe to a good scientific journal aimed at laymen -- which I don't -- rather than rely on the popular press. 

But the "eye of Sauron" -- I do like that.