Got stumbled?? by reading title “The Donuts that Eats…” but in reality we eat donuts then how it can eat??? Actually frankly speaking it’s right but not the donuts we eat its the Donuts look alike bizzare Black Holes!!!
I hope you have heard word black hole atleast once. Coming staright to the point, black hole os a dead star! It is so powerful that it eats (sucks) everything around it whether it’s a galaxy, stars, planets you or even the very lighter “Light”!!
Now how did this came into trending?? Because scientist (more precisely astronomers) around the world has taken the photograph of the one of yhe mightiest Black hole that sits in the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way! This Monster is also called as Sagittarius A or SgrA. You know that Sun sits at the centre of our solar system like this a super massive black hole sits there at distance of 256 trillion Kilometres!!!! also called as 27,000 light years!! To digest it, consider that you are traveling at speed of light (that’s 3 lakhs meters per second)then this black holes sites at such huge distance.
Taking photos is our daily “rituals”! so what’s special in taking photo of black hole?? I would like to ask you that can you photograph a dark room?? I think, no. So just think that astronomers have clicked a photo of dark region means black hole & that too far far away from us!! This was possible with several Scientific & Engineering Marvels like the Space Telescopes! These telescopes are living in space and looking deep or farther into the universe! Say these are the earth’s binoculars. Also, the amazing thing is that, as there is plenty of dust in line of sight between earth & centre of our galaxy. So they (astronomers) used a different “views” which can be pierced through this dust and look beyond it! Such different telescopes with different “views” are also called as Infrared Telescope, Ultraviolet Telescope & X- Rays Telescope! These telescopes have their respective “views” or “Wavelengths” through which they see the world (means the universe). But this image isn’t a quick work, as it started almost 5 years ago in 2017 .
This have many telescopes to look into the dark! Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), Chandra Observatory Telescope, NuSTAR Telescopes with help of Earth based telescopes. The size if this donut is around 10 light minutes. To understand this distance, please note that with speed of light, it takes around 10 minutes to travel from one point to other extreme point of the Black hole. Our sun light takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. So we can say that this black hole is as Big as the earth-sun distance or it will sits between earth & mars!!!
This image also gave another confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity that predicts that all black holes look and behave the same, despite their mass.
So this way we are able to see the Centre of our Milky Way galaxy’s or Centre of Attraction and such Donut eats… almost everything including the light!
References:
1) https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/sagittarius-a-nasa-telescopes-support-event-horizon-telescope-in-studying-milky-ways.html
2) https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy
©️ Ambarish Pawar
14/05/2022
Image Courtesy: NASA
