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HEART OF DARKNESS

Young Bites. Dated: 4/16/2019 9:12:25 AM

In a truly remarkable feat of astronomy, scientists have for the first
time taken a picture of a black hole.
Just before the 50th anniversary of man’s adventure to the moon, scientists
have announced that they have successfully managed to capture an
image of a black hole. This celestial object, predicted in so many physics
equations all the way from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, has
finally been manifest in physical form, albeit in a blurry picture that looks
like the corona during a solar eclipse. The flurry of spherical images and
the attendant data are helping scientists develop new insights into the
mysterious environment close to black holes, where the pull of gravity is
so intense that it has the power to destroy all known realities. This will
also help us understand the origin of jets of radiation that are blasted out
from the black holes close to the speed of light, creating colourful flashes
across the cosmos. This is an amazing achievement that also highlights
just how far astronomical observation has come in the 400 years since
the invention of the telescope by Dutchman Hans Lippershey, not Galileo
as many wrongly believe. This discovery just highlights why mankind
should keep on exploring the planets and why this should be a global quest.
The remarkable progress we have made in the past few decades in astronomy
has been in no small part due to the tremendous public success
of space-based observatories such as Hubble, Chandra and Kepler. Many
people who believe in astrology say that our future is written in the stars,
which is correctly dismissed as bunkum by those of a scientific bent.
Some astrologers are, in fact, interpreting the black hole lying in the
constellation of Virgo as a sign that we all need to use our higher mind
and knowledge to assess our emotions. But our future is definitely in the
stars, and while many nations, now led by China, continue to search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence, it may not be too far-fetched that it will be
humankind that will colonise the stars eventually. And for that we must
keep exploring the universe and answering some fundamental questions.
Not just of science but also philosophy, as the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig
Veda says,“Who really knows? Who here will proclaim it? Whence was it
produced? Whence is this creation? The Gods came afterwards with the
creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?” May
be one day we will find out the answers to the questions that our most
enlightened of ancestors asked. For that day to come, mankind has to keep
exploring the heavens. At the same time, we must take care of where we
live and we must not forget the earth