Can We Fall Into the Sky?

Can We Fall Into the Sky?

Black holes couldn’t have resulted from stellar collapse, from the normal evolution of massive star systems, because they were too small. Maybe they were primordial, left over from the Big Bang, captured by some unimaginable starship and towed to their destinated stations. Or maybe they were made from scratch.

There is a disk of glowing hydrogen rotating about the center of the Galaxy, and within it a ring of molecular clouds rushing outward toward the periphery of the Milky Way. You can see the ordered motions in the giant molecular cloud complex Sagittarius B2, which had for decades been a favourite hunting ground for complex organic molecules by radio-astronomical experts on Earth. Closer to the center, another giant molecular cloud is located, and then Sagittarius A West, an intense radio source.

And just adjacent at the very center of the Galaxy, locked in a passionate gravitational embrace, is a pair of immense black holes. The mass of one of them is five millions suns. Rivers of gas the size of solar systems are pouring down its mow.

Illustration: Elena

These two colossal, two supermassive black holes are orbiting one another at the center of the Galaxy.

In one second Cygnus A produces more energy than the Sun does in 40,000 years. Two enormous jets of gas, fleeing apart at almost the speed of light, are making a complex web of Rankine-Hugoniot shock fronts with the thin intergalactic gas – and producing in the process a radio beacon that shone brightly over most of the universe. All the matter in this enormous structure, 500,000 light-years across, was pouring out of a tiny, almost inconspicuous point in space exactly midway between the jets.

Bata Shoe Museum. I half-remember one summer’s night, when I was a girl. I had feared I would fall into the sky. (Quotations from M. Jorgensen). Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)