For the first time, astronomers have captured an actual black hole image, which was released today with much fanfare.

What struck me was how closely this image matches the artist conception of the double-black hole system Dante from my story “The Freefall of the Symship Uscar” (currently being prepped for the slushpiles). You can see the full image on the front page of the website you’re currently viewing, but here is a cropped version with just the double black hole:

Of course the story describes a binary black hole system so there are two event horizons, but the overall picture is pretty darn close, including even the colors, yellow near the center and purplish-red at the outer fringes.

The SS Uscar story image, used as the banner for this web site’s front page, was created based on verbal descriptions from the story by the artist known as Scruffyman whom I hired on Fiverr. I highly recommend him, by the way, and you can find his Fiverr page HERE.

There are physical differences between the real and imagined black holes, however. The real Messier-87 black hole is about 6.5 billion solar masses, while the fictional Dante system has two black holes each about 110,000 solar masses. Because they are in orbit around each other, my instructions to the artist included swirling arms of material flying off in a way similar to a spiral galaxy. The real black hole is a single object and shows a disc-like halo without those swirling arms.

It remains to be seen if those extra strands of material would actually occur on any real binary black hole system. Hopefully one will someday be discovered and imaged!

The artist also took some liberty based on a suggestion I had. In the story the Dante system is described as being demonic, and can you make out a fanged face in the picture, the double black holes serving as eyes?

If one day an actual binary black hole system is imaged, you can be certain I will be looking for teeth in the swirling halo surrounding them!