Two images came into my in-box this morning from wildly different directions, which in their combination set up a fizzy train of thought in their wake. (No doubt because of my current thinking on images in the Anthropocene, including images of that weird space where we find the religious, spiritual, and divine. And maybe because of a recent brief revisit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s final, unfinished text The Visible and the Invisible, with its chiasmic interpretation of the phenomenology that intertwines us all with and against each other.)
The first of these was a Ukraine war “icon” from a series shared on NPR reporter Julian Hayda’s “Unorthodox Icons” Facebook page. This particular image shows Mary, the Mother of God, seemingly crushing, or perhaps gently enclosing and redirecting, with her soft, sheltering hands, the firing main gun assemblies of several “Z”-marked Russian tanks.
Images like these can be controversial among those for whom they breach the sacred-secular divide. Every constitution of the world includes “divinities” whereby the invisible, that which hides behind the opacity of things, is concretely imagined and made sense of. Images of divinities have marked the history of religion, which effectively means the history of human conceptions (and practices) of the cosmos that harbors us.
That cosmos has been brought to our perception in very different ways by computer-assisted telescopes and photographic imaging systems. This week — my second image — scientists shared “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy,” a “chaotic supermassive black hole” around which the galaxy seems to have formed. It looks like this:
To say that this is an image of the black hole is not quite right. It is a colorized image averaged out from thousands collected from an algorithmically coordinated global network of telescopic eyes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. As for what it shows:
“Although we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.”
Supermassive black holes (as opposed to ordinary “stellar-mass” black holes, which we might think of as mere mortals, the remains of caved-in stars, in contrast to the divine supermassives) are believed by astronomers to exist at the center of virtually all galaxies, which makes their relationship to those galaxies somewhat akin to what suns are to their planetary systems. The chicken-and-egg question of whether they are the “seeds” of galaxies or are formed in the process of a galaxy’s growth, as “stars fall into the central gravity well of the galaxy,” is unresolved — which makes it somewhat akin to Alfred North Whitehead’s process theism, according to which God is both eternal and temporal, a creative “lure” for the growth of processual creatures like us, but also a companion who grows and co-suffers alongside his/her/their creatures.
The image looks very much like the one I shared of another black hole in my climate trauma talk of last fall, which was a 2019 image of the black hole Powehi — which happens to be about 1,500 times as massive as our own “local” (newly photographed) black hole.
While so far we’ve only seen two of these images, there is already a generic quality emerging to them, as they magnify tiny data points from an observed sky that is far away not only in space but also in time. Powehi is in fact 53 million light-years away, which means that the black hole looked that way, to eyes like ours (belonging to a hypothetical observer standing next to them), 53 million years ago during the Eocene. Sagittarius A, the name of our “local” newly imaged black hole, is much closer — a mere 27,000 light years away, so within a Holocene or two of time (units) away from us.
As the article that announced the new photo states, “Infrared astrometry of stellar orbits constrains the mass, distance, and, therefore, ring diameter of Sgr A* [Sagittarius A] to approximately 1% accuracy,” which leaves us to wonder about the other 99%.
The language used to describe these black holes, or “dark hearts” at the centers of their galaxies, fascinates me, especially when they get personified — ours is described as a “burbling and gurgling” “gentle giant,” while the M87 black hole is “huge and flamboyant” and “like the Buddha, just sitting there” — and when they take on the apophatic theological resonances that scholars of religion would recognize. (Apophatic theology attempts to understand divinity by negation, that is, by positing divinity as unknowable, unseeable, etc.)
In a small sample of media coverage of this week’s image event, we find seeing and the unseeable, mystery and the unknowable, gentle giants and ravenous monsters swallowing things into bottomless pits (that happen to be holding everything together), and the lifting of many-layered veils revealing, well, doughnuts (emphases added):
“’We have seen what we thought was “unseeable,”‘ Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said [in 2019].”
“The black hole, seen from Earth near the constellation Sagittarius, has a mass equal to more than 4 million suns. The new image shows it with three bright spots [trinitarian Christians take note!] along a ring that, to the surprise of the scientists, tilts face-on toward the Earth. By the standards of other supermassive black holes, the scientists said, the one at the heart of our Milky Way is relatively calm — as quiescent as something that gobbles stars and reaches temperatures measured in the trillions of degrees can possibly be.”
“What’s at the very core of a black hole is a question that the scientists did not attempt to answer. ‘It is unknowable,’ Fish said after the news conference.”
“‘They are the most mysterious objects in the universe, and they hold the keys to large-scale structure in the observable cosmos,’ Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope, said in an interview in advance of Thursday’s briefing.”
“‘We now see that the black hole is swallowing the nearby gas and light, pulling them into a bottomless pit,’ Ramesh Narayan, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. ‘This image confirms decades of theoretical work to understand how black holes eat.'”
“Sagittarius A is consuming only a trickle of material, in contrast to the typical depiction of black holes as violent, ravenous monsters of the cosmos. ‘If SgrA* were a person, it would only consume a single grain of rice every million years,’ said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. M87*, by contrast, is one of the largest black holes in the universe and features vast, powerful jets that launch light and matter from its poles into intergalactic space.”
“Beyond the science, astronomers acknowledged an emotional connection with finally seeing the enigmatic object about which our home galaxy revolves. ‘It’s another doughnut, but it’s our doughnut,’ said Younsi.”
“Scientists have long thought that a supermassive black hole hidden deep in the chaotic central region of our galaxy was the only possible explanation for the bizarre things that happen there—such as giant stars slingshotting around an invisible something in space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Yet they’ve been hesitant to say that outright.”
“Sagittarius A* is our own private supermassive black hole, the still point around which our galaxy revolves.”
If every scientific discovery can be thought of as divinity peeking into our world, it doesn’t become divinity until it has been made sense of in a way that has somehow reshaped us. In this case, so far, we have our black hole which, for all we know, doesn’t care a fig for us. But if it did, it’s nice to know, at this precarious time, that we have a gentle giant that appears to be tilting, leaning, or perhaps nodding, in our direction.
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/05/sagittarius-a-black-hole-milky-way/629838/
