In May 2022 astronomers announced an extraordinary discovery. They claimed they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there. It is a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.

The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at a meeting with the press when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added, “I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since. But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”

In 2019, the same team captured an image of the black hole in a different galaxy. One astronomer described the discovery this way: “We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable.’”

Possible Preaching Angles:

One day, the Bible promises that we will see the “unseeable” when we meet God face-to-face and Jesus wipes every tear from our eyes.