MESSIER 74 GALAXY—Recoiling in pain after the gravitational vortex tore off a chunk of flesh and bone down to the first knuckle, God, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, reportedly lost the tip of His right index finger Monday in an accident involving an intermediate-mass black hole. “Ah, son of a bitch—Christ, that hurt like a motherfucker,” said the Divine Creator, who sucked blood from the mangled stump as He chastised Himself for not paying closer attention to what He was doing while building a new spiral galaxy. “I knew I should have shut that thing down eons ago. Oh well, the tip of my finger is in there now, so no use trying to get it back. Dammit, now there’s blood all over the universe.” The Lord then wrapped His finger in an excess piece of robe and went off in search of a neutron star to cauterize the wound.
A cross-section showing Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Scientists found that the black hole at the center of our galaxy is spinning so fast its dragging space-time along.
Don’t worry. The distortion won’t affect us.
But it will help scientists learn more about how galaxies form and evolve.
A team of scientists has discovered that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning so fast that it’s squishing space-time.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope, a team of physicists calculated the speed at which the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is spinning, publishing their findings last month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
They found that Sagittarius A* — located 26,000 light-years away from Earth, according to NASA — is spinning so fast that it’s actually dragging surrounding space-time along with it, squishing it down like a football, CNN reported.
“With this spin, Sagittarius A* will be dramatically altering the shape of space-time in its vicinity,” Ruth Daly, the lead author on the study, told CNN. “We’re used to thinking and living in a world where all the spatial dimensions are equivalent — the distance to the ceiling and the distance to the wall and the distance to the floor … they all sort of are linear, it’s not like one is totally squished up compared to the others.”
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“But if you have a rapidly rotating black hole, the space-time around it is not symmetric,” Daly said, according to CNN. “The spinning black hole is dragging all of the space-time around with it … it squishes down the space-time, and it sort of looks like a football.”
That may sound alarming, but don’t worry; the black hole is way too far away to affect us here on Earth.
But, Daly said, understanding how black holes function can help scientists learn more about the formation and evolution of galaxies like our own.
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