How the first black hole ever discovered was discovered at the University of Toronto
This is a photo of a star called HDE226868. It’s a blue supergiant, more than 20 times as big and hundreds of thousands of times as bright as the Sun. It’s relatively close by — in the same part of the galaxy as we are: a thin line of stars between two of the great spiraling arms of the Milky Way — but it still takes light 1,600 years to reach us from there. It’s about 16 quadrillion kilometers away. You can’t see it with your naked eye; you need at least a small telescope to glimpse it through the clouds of interstellar gas and dust that stand between it and us.