 Welcome to the Micro-Observatory Challenge. My name is Sarah Markoff. I'm Ormila Cherey-Marie. Hi, I'm Eileen Meyer. You're looking at the first ever groundbreaking image of the light just outside of the event horizon of the supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy. A galaxy is a collection of billions to sometimes trillions of stars that all live together in the universe. At the center of almost every galaxy we've looked at, we found a supermassive black hole. The image of M87 taken with the event horizon telescope is the first time that we've been able to directly look at a black hole. So what you're looking at is actually an image of the shadow of the black hole in M87. This is light coming from hot gas really close to the supermassive black hole. That image of the ring around the black hole is very iconic and something that makes M87 really popular among astronomers. So for the sky watchers out there, M87 is in the constellation of Virgo as the second largest constellation in the sky. And it sits in what we call the Virgo cluster of galaxies 55 million light years away. M87 and our own Milky Way are extremely different galaxies. M87 is what we call an elliptical galaxy. For obvious reasons it looks like a big elliptical ball. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. It's only about 100,000 light years across, I say only. Whereas the elliptical galaxy of M87 is probably at least 200,000 light years across. So it's significantly bigger and it contains more stars compared to the disk of the Milky Way. M87 has one of the most dramatic examples of what we call a jet. This is coming from the region immediately surrounding the supermassive black hole. First you'll notice that it appears to come out of the center of the galaxy. And it does in fact come from very close to the black hole, but it's not actually coming out of the black hole. The matter that's falling in never makes it all the way in and is in fact shot back out into these jets. The jet moves at 99% the speed of light. So it's one of the fastest moving things in the universe. The jet of M87 is coming almost directly at us. It's only offset from our line of sight by 20 degrees. We know that supermassive black holes like M87 produce bipolar jets. Two jets pointed in opposite directions. But we can only see the one that's pointed towards us. And because it's moving at almost the speed of light, that means it's brighter when it's pointing towards us than away from us. We can't see the light that's moving away from us because it gets much, much, much dimmer as it moves away from us. Have you ever wanted to make your own astronomy image? We'd like to hear about your ideas. Okay, we want to see your image. And please share your images with us and tell us about the choices you made. Did you pick particular colors? Could you like them? Was there some scientific reasoning behind it? We'd like to see what you've done.