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Monday, 16 May 2022

The Milky Way black hole, in pictures. Plus: Women founders are underfunded

The Milky Way black hole pictured for the very first time: An international team of astronomers managed to give us a first glimpse of the supermassive black hole that lives at the center of our galaxy, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the New York Times reported. The photo’s significance lies in the fact that observing a black hole is basically impossible, since no light can escape it. Known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* ), the image was unveiled by the EHT Collaboration last week. For scale, the object is a staggering 4 mn times the mass of the Sun, an EHT team member said during the press conference revealing the image.

Female founders continue to face a fundraising glass ceiling: For every USD 1 women receive in investments in the African startup scene, their male counterparts get USD 25, according to the World Bank. From 2013 through 2021, all-female startup teams only received 3% of the USD 1.7 bn of investments flowing into the continent’s startup scene, compared to the 76% of investments secured by startups with all-male founding teams.

It’s not much better in the Occident: Startups with female-only founders secured only 2.3% of venture capital funding in the US last year, while startups with a mixed-gender founder team earned 14.7% of total VC funding in 2021. Over in Europe, all-male founding teams again secured the lion’s share of VC funding, accounting for 85.3% of the investment pie, compared to 1.1% going towards female-only founding teams and 13.6% for mixed-gender founder teams.


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