Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Sagittarius A* Getting Into Super Bowl Spirit, Warps Spacetime Into an Oval Shape Like an American Football

A supermassive black hole in our galaxy is seemingly in the spirit of the Super Bowl. Experts notice that Sagittarius A* has warped spacetime into the shape of an American football because it spins so fast.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/National Science Foundation/Keyi )
Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole Sagittarius A* Getting Into Super Bowl Spirit, Warps Spacetime Into an Oval Shape Like an American Football

**Sagittarius A* Warps Spacetime Into an Oval Shape**

General relativity, developed by Albert Einstein, states that a large spinning object can move spacetime around. This is known as "frame dragging," it has even been shown that spacetime around our rotating Earth is warped.

According to a new study, the effect of huge objects, or supermassive black holes, millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun, is far more noticeable. Furthermore, spacetime flattens around such a big object as it spins faster, taking on that oval shape.

Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is the name of our galaxy's 4.1 million solar mass black holy. Its spin rate has proven to be elusive. Most estimations have been very different.

Now, astronomers working under the direction of Ruth Daly of Penn State University have used a technique known as the "outflow method" to determine the angular velocity, or number of spins per second, of Sgr A*.

The outflow method gets its name because it measures material flowing out of black holes, which may seem strange initially as black holes are generally thought to be responsible for drawing material in. Nonetheless, a black hole's outflow may manifest as a massive jet of matter that produces radio waves and is magnetically collimated.

In the meantime, heated clumps of plasma, or ionized gas, radiate X-rays when they form in the disk of matter surrounding a black hole and have the potential to float away. Because the subsequent frame-dragging amplifies and tightens the black hole's magnetic field like a belt closer to its perimeter, these clumps, known as plasmoids, grow more effectively when a black hole is spinning rapidly. As a result, more favorable magnetically intense circumstances are produced, which promote plasmoid production.

Using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescopes and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Daly's team observed Sgr A* in the past. It determined that its angular velocity was 60% of the highest value that can be selected from the speed of light. Stated differently, Sgr A* is spinning so quickly that spacetime is warped into an oval form.

"Our work may help settle the question of how fast our galaxy's supermassive black hole is spinning," Daly said. "Our results indicate that Sgr A* is spinning rapidly, which is interesting and has far-reaching implications."

The study came weeks before the anticipated Super Bowl LVIII, where the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers.

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What Is the Theory of General Relativity?

General relativity is a theory Einstein developed about how gravity affects spacetime. The idea extended Einstein's particular relativity theory, which he had proposed ten years earlier and was published in 1915. Although special relativity denied the existence of gravity, it maintained that space and time are intimately linked.

NASA claims that during the years between the two papers, Einstein concluded that incredibly huge objects deform spacetime, resulting in the manifestation of gravity. Per NASA Glenn Research Center, the gravitational force pulling two bodies apart depends on how heavy each one is and how far apart they are.

Your center of mass is moving away from the Earth even as the Earth's core is drawing you toward it to keep you firmly planted. However, the force holding you securely in place also has the much smaller you in place, while the larger body hardly feels your tug. However, Isaac Newton's laws assume gravity to be an intrinsic property of an object with an extended range of action.

With his theory of special relativity, Einstein demonstrated that the speed of light in a vacuum remains constant regardless of the observer's velocity and established that the laws of physics apply to all non-accelerating observers.

Thus, he discovered that space and time were entwined into a solitary continuum that he called spacetime. Additionally, anything that happens to one observer at the exact moment may happen to another at a different time.