The average height of a person is about 5.5 feet. The Earth is about 7.5 million times bigger than us. Wow! Doesn’t that seem like a lot? Wait till you picture this: if we were to try and fit a million Earths inside the Sun, there would still be space to fit in another three hundred thousand more! This is just a size comparison of how big the world beyond truly is. You all know about the Milky Way — the galaxy of our planet — technically our home too, it has something in the centre of it — a super, gigantic, MASSIVE blackhole called the Sagittarius A (Sgr A*). If we were to picture its size, this cosmic abyss would round up to be the size of about 4 million suns! Check how many zeros the number 4 million has!
The Sgr A* is located at the center of the Milky Way and has been present for roughly about 13.8 BILLION years😮💨. It is estimated that it is 26,500 light years from Earth, this means that light would take twenty six thousand five hundred years to make its way from the hole to us, that is if it can escape it.
Not true actually, we believe that all blacks are a soul sucking void of darkness not even leaving light (the fastest thing in the universe) to escape it’s clutches, the unnaturally natural super massive abyss does use its gravitational power but unlike many other bottomless holes seen, the Sgr A* doesn’t actively ‘feed’ on matter, which also means that it is relatively dim.
Jumping back to my previous statement of thinking, if light would escape to conclude, it would be… Drum roll… NO! Light would not be able to escape it. RIP the light that tried its best to enlighten us with, erm… darkness? Due to the black hole engulfing the lightning hitting it, it is invisible as light is not reflecting off of the hole (Well, that was kinda obvious🫠)
This is also why the first time we discovered it, we did it through radio waves. These exceptionally smart gentlemen — Bruce Balick and Robert Brown in 1974 used radio telescopes to find a strong compact radio signal coming from the centre of the galaxy, from the Sagittarius constellation, hence the name. The first picture of the ‘Mysterious force’ was taken only three years ago, in 2022, by the Event Horizon Telescope.
Sagittarius A has an intense gravitational pull that allows phenomena like gravitational lensing, which enables astronomers to study far objects in the universe, to occur. Its gravitational pull allows the stars in the galaxy to orbit around it, with some near the void revolving at a speed of 1.6 million km/hr around it. We can say that the Sagittarius A is the ‘Sun’ of all stars, as they revolve around it.
There’s a lot more we don’t know about the MASSIVE space devourer. There are many exceptionally smart scientists making exceptionally smart researches, through exceptionally smart discoveries about the world beyond one at a time, every single day. Watch out! You never know what will be thrown in your way next!
Top comments (0)