With no apparent light pollution near Pawna Lakeside Camping, the dark sky looked heavily star studded. As we stopped for a stargazing moment during our nocturnal walk, Kedar was showing us the various constellations in the night sky. A question that was troubling me for a long time instantly popped up. I asked Kedar - "Is the constellation Sagittarius visible in the night sky that we are seeing right now ?". I barely remember the answer to the question, but why did I ask about it in the first place, is something, upon which this entire writing is based.
Some 26,000 light years away in the central regions of our own Milky Way galaxy, lies this constellation Sagittarius. Symbolically, it is represented by a Centaur (A mythical half-man half-horse archer shooting arrows). One of the stars in this constellation is invisible, and it does not twinkle in the night sky. This particular entity is so massive that it weighs in around 4.3 million times more massive than our powerful Sun. It is this invisible star of the show, which holds our beautiful and magnificent spiral Milky Way galaxy in one piece. The name of this enigmatic entity is Sagittarius A* (pronounced as 'Sag A star' or represented as Sgr A*), and it is a supermassive Black Hole.
It is amazing & fascinating to wrap our brain around the fact, that while our entire observable universe is estimated to be 93 billion light years across, there exists a special place just 26,000 light years away from us, where the universe as we know of, ceases to exist. It is kind of a very tiny hole on a big sheet of paper, with everything lying on the other side of the hole still a big mystery. A black hole is the ultimate end point of space, time, matter, energy, and our knowledge. It has an insatiable hunger, and it keeps feeding upon objects within its reach, tirelessly. Its gravity is absolute and infinite. The hot gases (much hotter than our typical camp-fire flame) are accelerated to nearly light speed, as they swirl around the black-hole. So, in one sense, the black-hole makes fire a billion billion billion times hotter before devouring it, which in turn, makes it more powerful. Its huge gravity rips apart everything to the level of atoms before consuming it. It is the same gravity that causes the entire galaxy to rotate around it, along with the Sun & the solar system. Since black-holes have infinite gravity, they can consume light itself, thereby rendering themselves invisible to all our optical instruments & eyes. Sitting alone, aloof, invisible, conspicuous, yet full of energy, the black-hole is the unsung hero of our galaxy, who never likes to take credit for the existence & sustenance of over 200 billion stars & a trillion plus planets.
Perhaps, in my quest to see the region of sky which houses the supermassive black hole of our Milky Way galaxy Sgr A*, I was able to see an excellent teacher in that impenetrable blackness. The insatiable hunger of black hole motivates me to cultivate the same hunger for knowledge. The extreme gravity that rips everything to the level of atoms teaches to accept unadulterated knowledge & facts after ripping apart every form of bias, prejudice, jibe, political correctness & sugarcoating. The act of black holes devouring everything within their reach and enhancing their gravitational energy is an important lesson in accepting love, appreciations, magnanimity, charity along with negativity like hatred, anger, jealousy, insecurity and using all of it to enhance our mental strength. For an introvert like me, who loves to work behind the stage without any care for the credits, a black hole is the ultimate role model - invisible & conspicuous, yet supremely confident of it's sheer power, without which, everything we see, would not have existed in the first place. A black hole is more or less a fundamental entity, like an atom i.e. a black hole made out of peanut butter has the exact same properties with the one made out of iron nails of same mass. While scientists have discovered the secrets of the atom, they are still struggling to unravel the secrets, black holes hide deep within their singularities. In this regard, a black hole give us an important lesson that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. So, as simple as it may sound, and as sophisticated as it may seem to imagine, the below quote wraps it all up -
"If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That's the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there's a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together." - Michio Kaku
