We are all involved in our little lives, our noses at the grindstone, making a living, trying to make a difference. Sometimes it is worth looking up … wayyyyy up, and see that fellow scientists are hard at work expanding the edges of our knowledge. We have known, based on Einstein’s theories, about black holes, believed in their existence based on indirect evidence from light bent around massively heavy objects. I had never heard of Sagittarius A*, the name applied to the mysterious unseen object at the center of Milky Way, but apparently we’ve been able to track large stars that slingshot around an unseen object with the mass of 4 billion suns(!) and have named that entity Sagittarius A*, and believed it to be a supermassive black hole. Wow, the theories we can craft with the puzzling evidence from our telescopes.
Of course, we still have NO IDEA about such things as Dark Matter, a theoretical construct we need in our understanding of how galaxies stay together (there is not enough matter in the ,mutual gravitational attraction of visible stars to explain why a galaxy spirals and stays together), or Dark Energy, another theoretical construct we need to explain why galaxies are moving moving away from each other at an ACCELERATING rate, when they should be decelerating due to gravitational attraction? Is it like Dark Fiber, those unused cables of internet connectivity? (No) or Dark Mode in the Mac operating system? (No)
And now, this, an actual image of a massive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. We finally see what Einstein saw in his equations half a century ago. Cool beans. Einstein rocks.
CMIO’s take?
