Are Earth's scientists finally beginning to grasp the function of so-called "black holes?" Urantia Book students have long known of these interesting space phenomenon. In the following aricle we read of some of the newest thinking in the scientific community regarding a particularly massive "black hole" in the Milky Way. And the thinking is beginning to take on a decidedly "Urantian" flavor... Read, and decide for yourself.
N.B.: Urantia Book references for the following article are found here: Bold text by editor.
p173:1 15:6.6 The Dark Islands of Space. These are the dead suns and other large aggregations of matter devoid of light and heat. The dark islands are sometimes enormous in mass and exert a powerful influence in universe equilibrium and energy manipulation. The density of some of these large masses is well-nigh unbelievable. And this great concentration of mass enables these dark islands to function as powerful balance wheels, holding large neighboring systems in effective leash. They hold the gravity balance of power in many constellations; many physical systems which would otherwise speedily dive to destruction in near-by suns are held securely in the gravity grasp of these guardian dark islands. It is because of this function that we can locate them accurately. We have measured the gravity pull of the luminous bodies, and we can therefore calculate the exact size and location of the dark islands of space which so effectively function to hold a given system steady in its course.
p456:4 41:1.5 One Supreme Power Center of the sixth order is stationed at the exact gravity focus of each local system. In the system of Satania the assigned power center occupies a dark island of space located at the astronomic center of the system. Many of these dark islands are vast dynamos which mobilize and directionize certain space-energies, and these natural circumstances are effectively utilized by the Satania Power Center, whose living mass functions as a liaison with the higher centers, directing the streams of more materialized power to the Master Physical Controllers on the evolutionary planets of space.
Here is the article:
These cosmic monsters appear to be key to understanding how galaxies are being formed.
By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post October 31, 2007
For years, astronomers speculated that a giant, mysterious force lay at the center of the Milky Way, but it wasn't until four years ago that UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez definitively showed what it was.
Using new techniques for peering into the dusty heart of the galaxy, Ghez's observations proved that scores of stars were rapidly orbiting what could only be a black hole. But it wasn't the kind of garden-variety black hole created when a star explodes and dies; it was hundreds of thousands of times as powerful -- a "supermassive" black hole, as they are now known.
Her discoveries, along with the work of scientists studying other galaxies, have in a short time led researchers to the surprising conclusion that most, if not all, of the universe's hundreds of billions of galaxies have supermassive black holes at their core. Even more striking, the astronomers have found that the black holes' mass and nature are closely related to the size and makeup of the surrounding galaxies.
Creators and destroyers
It also appears that these cosmic monsters -- which can "eat" stars whole -- are key to understanding how galaxies were formed and are still being formed today.
Black holes appear, for instance, to be both creators and destroyers -- swallowing stars or gases that come too close while also spewing out jets of super-high-energy particles and radiation generated by this violent feeding process. The jets, which can be millions of light-years in length, are believed to seed galaxies with the mass and energy that will, in time, become new stars and perhaps even planets.
Drawn to black holes
With many promising areas to research, the supermassives are drawing astronomers and astrophysicists back into black hole research. In 1915, based on purely theoretical calculations, Albert Einstein laid the groundwork for the existence of these bizarre phenomena, which have such strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape them. But research on them languished for decades because there was no way to observe them directly.
The Hubble Space Telescope provided the first real evidence of the existence of supermassive black holes -- revealing in 1994 that something was orbiting rapidly around the nuclei of some distant galaxies, suggesting the presence of a huge mass contained in a very small area.
Since then, the Hubble, NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Keck and other very large, high-resolution ground telescopes have begun to unravel more about these central black holes -- which can be as large as the distance from the sun to well past Mars, and as small as New Jersey.
As supermassive black holes go, the one at the center of the Milky Way (about 27,000 light-years, or 158 trillion miles, away from our exurbanite sun) is dormant and small. It is believed to have the mass of almost 4 million suns and does not appear to be sending out jets of radiation. Some of the larger supermassives are hundreds of millions to many billions times as massive as our sun.
Xerpi
