Entertainment

Matt Bellamy delights Muse fans with black hole tweet

‘Supermassive black hole, finally spotted,’ the band’s frontman posted.
‘Supermassive black hole, finally spotted,’ the band’s frontman posted. ‘Supermassive black hole, finally spotted,’ the band’s frontman posted.

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy used the news of the first photo of a black hole to make reference to one of the band’s most famous songs.

Bellamy, 48, and the group had a hit with Supermassive Black Hole in 2006 – 13 years later an image of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration.

“Supermassive black hole, finally spotted,” Bellamy tweeted, including a link to a Los Angeles Times story.

Bellamy went into greater detail on Instagram, sharing an image of the black hole and writing: “Finally photographed! In the swirling heart of a distant galaxy, 55 million light-years from Earth, lies a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times greater than that of our sun.”

The tweet received more than 14,000 likes, while those familiar with the song joined in the fun by referencing lyrics.

“Are glaciers going to melt in the dead of night?” one social media user tweeted.

“Been waiting for this tweet all day,” one Twitter user wrote, while another added: “ah, there it is”.

The image of the supermassive black hole at the core of galaxy M87 was obtained by combining eight radio dishes around the world into one global telescope.

Nothing like this photo has ever been obtained before. Previously, scientists have only been able to visualise black holes in simulations.