In 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet published his paper “Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk” in #Astronomy and #Astrophysics in which he presented the world’s first simulated photograph of a black hole and its accretion disk.
Image Alt: A spherical black hole, surrounded by a glowing white accretion disc, centred in a black field speckled with outflowing radiation.
In 2019, the first real image of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and published in the paper “Focus on the First Event Horizon Telescope Results” in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT
Image Alt: A circular black hole, surrounded by an irregular bright orange ring, with some fainter orange illumination extending beyond it into a black field.
Luminet remarked on the striking continuity between the two images (and other early computer simulations that followed), art prefiguring radio imagery by way of mathematics.
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11196
In 1953, Jackson Pollock painted The Deep, which hangs in the Centre Pompidou today.
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cg9Kgy
Image Alt: A white field, smudged with blue and yellow, with a black void running vertically through the middle of the painting, crossed with strands of white paint and edged with hints of red.
Olivier Michelon wrote of the painting: “The work resembles a cloud of brushed and poured milky paint, a cream mass in the center of which a slit discovers a matte black background accented with red. By approaching the atmospheric sensations of contemporary color-field painting, Jackson Pollock delivers with The Deep a vision that has remained singular in his career. Dug in the center of a torn nebula, this abyssal space still resonates, indicating an unexplored direction.”
In 2022, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory released a MeerKAT radio telescope image of the galactic centre.
Image Alt: A grey field, with a red feature, the galactic plane, running horizontally through the middle of the image. Dark red, almost black filaments extend from the feature.
What Michelon could not have known is that Pollock’s torn nebula somehow presaged this image—not simply a nebula but the heart of the galaxy itself, radio bubbles bursting from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1532-5
A saturated abyss, an overflowing void. We can echo Hans-Georg Gadamer and say: the mode of being of nature is “pure self-presentation.”
https://books.google.ca/books?id=SkdMAQAAQBAJ
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