Today's little discovery: a radio pic from MeerKAT of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy millions of light years away, shooting two jets of material out at relativistic speeds (ie the two lines w knots). Not sure how far exactly, it's not in the literature Specifically, in radio we can't know exactly how far a thing is- we rely on optical data for that. This galaxy is just a nondescript small and faint blob in all-sky survey data, so no one's ever checked/ named it. The universe is just really big!

Astronomer here! With all the black hole news lately, it's worth a reminder that black holes are NOT like giant vacuum cleaners that "suck everything in" or similar. This is a common misconception and not at all how black holes work! 🧵 First of all, worth covering what a black hole *is*. It is a region where the gravity is so strong that nothing- light, particles, etc- can escape. The area beyond which things can't escape is called the "event horizon" marked in this @ehtelescope pic of the black hole M87*.