Whenever anything happens here on Earth, it’s only a matter of time before someone on the internet claims it was a hoax.
And now a flurry of conspiracy theorists have weighed in with depressingly predictable claims that incredible images of a supermassive black hole released yesterday are fake.
One of the most popular and inflammatory tweets was written by the hugely controversial men’s rights activity Roosh V, who shockingly tweeted: ‘This “black hole” photo is almost certainly fake. I’m not good at photoshop but can create a more believable black hole photo.
‘It only went viral because the news is desperate to pat a woman on the head for doing anything but make a baby.’
The notorious pick-up artist, who was once known for allegedly living in his mum’s basement, was referring to the vital contribution of 29-year-old computer scientist Katherine Bouman, who wrote the algorithms which allowed the image to be created.
Mr V’s tweet has been liked more than 400 times and retweeted 90 times.
Many of the bizarre fake picture claims were tweeted by people who think the Nasa Apollo lunar missions were also a hoax.
‘Picture of the black hole is fake just like the moon landing,’ one person wrote on Twitter.
We’re glad to report that other people appear to have been joking about the black hole being fake.
One Twitter user wrote: ‘The pic is more like a photoshopped LSD sausage roll. Fake?’
The famous UFO hunter Scott C Waring also offered his opinion on the black hole, although he appears to think the images are genuine.
Nonetheless, the alien investigator believed Nasa and the world’s top astronomers had got the shape of the hole wrong.
Waring wrote: ‘I added light to the photograph and quickly noticed that the outer wall was visible and was not a circle after all. The outer area was irregularly shaped with parts of it stretching out like arms.’
The supermassive black hole sits at the centre of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy that’s 55 million light-years from Earth.
It’s 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun and the images were snapped by eight ground-based radio telescopes around the globe which worked together as if they were one telescope the size of Earth.
‘This is an amazing accomplishment by the EHT team,’ said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
‘Years ago, we thought we would have to build a very large space telescope to image a black hole. By getting radio telescopes around the world to work in concert like one instrument, the EHT team achieved this, decades ahead of time.’
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