Powehi — First image of a black hole showing a glowing orange ring around a dark center

Powehi

2019exploitable imageclassic

Published September 23, 2026

On April 10th, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first photograph of a black hole, showing the supermassive object at the center of the M87 galaxy. Within hours, the orange ring image was hijacked by Redditors as an exploitable, spawning Photoshop battles, Surprised Pikachu edits, and a flood of remixes across the site.

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Overview

Powehi, also known as First Image of Black Hole, refers to the 2019 photograph of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy and the wave of image edits that followed. The picture itself looks like a fuzzy orange donut, a bright asymmetric ring of superheated gas circling a central dark shadow1. That simple shape gave editors an obvious empty target to fill, and Reddit threads filled it with portals, pizzas, camera lenses, Minecraft screens, and Sauron's eye4.

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Photoshop battles ran overnight, most using the same trick: take the ring, drop something round and cursed inside it, post. Powehi also got layered into reaction templates alongside Surprised Pikachu, riffing on the idea that humans had finally seen the unseeable. The picture worked as a template partly because the actual science was so absurd, a 6.5-billion-solar-mass object photographed 55 million light-years away2.

Origin & Background

Platform
News/press release (source) / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2019

The photograph came from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, a network of eight ground-based radio telescopes linked together to act as a single Earth-sized virtual dish2. On April 10th, 2019, the US National Science Foundation held seven simultaneous press conferences to announce the result, showing the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 871. Project director Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics described the moment by saying, "We have seen what we thought was unseeable"1. The image was the product of over 200 researchers working for more than a decade1.

How It Spread

The National Science Foundation posted the image to Twitter the same morning it was announced, and the tweet pulled roughly 29,700 retweets and 53,400 likes inside 12 hours3. News outlets including ABC News, CNN and BBC ran the picture on their front pages the same day1. On Reddit, a Surprised Pikachu mashup by user Dragonjazz picked up more than 33,600 upvotes in four hours, and r/photoshopbattles opened its own thread of edits4.

A parallel story exploded around Dr. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist whose photo circulated on Reddit as the person behind the image. Sexist troll attacks tried to strip her credit, prompting fellow EHT programmer Andrew Chael to defend her in a Twitter thread, and days later The Washington Post published a piece titled "Trolls hijacked a scientist's image to attack Katie Bouman"4. On April 12th, 2019, a version of the photo with Minecraft edited onto Bouman's laptop screen hit r/dankmemes and pulled over 54,200 upvotes.

Timeline

2019-04-10

US National Science Foundation announces the first-ever photograph of a black hole from the Event Horizon Telescope at seven simultaneous press conferences.

2019-04-10

NSF posts the image to Twitter, hitting about 29,700 retweets and 53,400 likes within 12 hours.

2019-04-10

Reddit user Dragonjazz posts a Surprised Pikachu mashup that pulls 33,600+ upvotes in four hours; r/photoshopbattles opens a dedicated thread.

2019-04-10

EHT programmer Andrew Chael posts a Twitter thread condemning sexist attacks on Katie Bouman.

2019-04-11

An r/unpopularopinion post attacks Bouman's public credit for the image, citing GitHub commit counts.

2019-04-12

A Minecraft-on-Bouman's-laptop edit hits r/dankmemes with 54,200+ upvotes; The Washington Post publishes coverage of the harassment campaign.

How to Use This Meme

The Powehi format typically drops a round or eye-shaped object into the dark center of the orange ring, treating the black hole as a fill-in frame. Common conventions include portals, cartoon eyes, camera lenses, pizzas, Minecraft blocks, and mashups with other 2019 meme formats like Surprised Pikachu4.

Frequently Asked Questions