The first real image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (see below) is not only a remarkable scientific achievement but also aligns astonishingly with previous predictions about black holes, including what they are and how they are formed by gravitational forces.
According to DigitalTrends, Sagittarius A* is classified as a supermassive black hole, typically found at the center of most galaxies. Our black hole is smaller than others: with a mass 4.3 million times that of the Sun, it is significantly smaller than other “monsters” like the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy, which was imaged in 2019 and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun!
Black holes will look the same regardless of their size.
However, one notable thing is that the images of the two aforementioned black holes appear quite similar, showing a shape resembling a donut. This inadvertently confirms physicists’ predictions that black holes will look the same regardless of their size.
“The appearance of light as a ring, with a dark area in the middle, indicates that it is entirely due to gravity,” said black hole researcher Dmitrios Psaltis from the University of Arizona. “All of this was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, the only theory of the universe that does not address the scale (of objects).”
The conclusion regarding the size of black holes is quite unusual because most things that exist at different scales look very different—Psaltis uses the example of an ant and an elephant, which appear very different due to several factors, one of which is their mass and how their bodies have evolved to support that mass. But black holes are not like that—they seem to look identical regardless of being big or small. Messier 87 is 1,500 times larger than Sagittarius A* and also significantly wider (as you can see in the comparison image below). Yet both look very similar.
All black holes will have a shape like a donut!
This means that even very small black holes, if we could take pictures of them, would also look like Sagittarius A* and Messier 87. They would all have a donut shape!
“No matter where we look, we will see donuts, and they will all look the same,” Psaltis said. “And the reason this is important—besides confirming our previous predictions—is that no one likes it. In physics, we often do not like a world where everything lacks a reference point, or in other words, lacks a defined size.”
