# Powehi 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. ## Origin 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 dish[2]. 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 87[1]. 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 decade[1]. - **Platform:** News/press release (source) / Reddit (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2019 ## 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 shadow[1]. 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 eye[4]. 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 away[2]. ## How to Use 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 Pikachu[4]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Powehi? Powehi is the name given to the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, whose first-ever photograph was released in April 2019 and quickly turned into a Reddit exploitable[1]. ### Where did Powehi come from? The image came from the Event Horizon Telescope, an eight-telescope global array whose result was announced by the National Science Foundation on April 10th, 2019[2]. ### What does Powehi mean? Powehi is the name attached to the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, the object shown in the historic 2019 photograph[1]. ### How do you use Powehi? People treat the orange ring as an empty frame and drop something round into the dark center, from portals and pizzas to Minecraft screens and Sauron's eye[4]. ### Is Powehi still popular? The Powehi image is still recognized as the first photograph of a black hole and its Reddit edits are a classic 2019 meme moment, though active remixing died down after that spring[4]. ## References 1. [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/10/world/black-hole-photo-scn/index.html]() 2. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-04-10/black-hole-event-horizon-telescope-announcement-astrophysics/10989534]() 3. [https://x.com/i/status/1116518544961830918]() 4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/powehi-first-image-of-black-hole]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/powehi-first-image-of-black-hole Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library