When the Abyss Turns Our Way

 

🌀Sagittarius A, Spin, and the Celestial Dance of Extremes

By Dhinakar Rajaram © 2025

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Image courtesy: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), via NSF / ESO / NASA.

Preface

It began, as many fascinations do in our century, with an image on social media. A striking visual on Instagram — this post — showed a luminous whirl at the centre of the Milky Way, captioned with the audacious claim that our galaxy’s black hole is “spinning near the speed limit of physics and aimed right at Earth.”

Curiosity, that old Newtonian apple, struck again. What did this mean? Could the cosmic engine anchoring the Milky Way truly be rotating at relativistic extremes, its axis inclined toward us, as though we were peering down the barrel of creation itself?

Thus began this essay — an amateur astronomer’s reflection on a discovery that blurs the line between the empirical and the ineffable.

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Image courtesy: NASA / ESA / ESO Composite Visualisation.

I. The Heart of Darkness, 26,000 Light-Years Away

At the heart of our galaxy, cloaked in the constellation Sagittarius, lies a gravitational monarch: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”).
It is a supermassive black hole, weighing about four million times the mass of our Sun, and situated roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth.

In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) gave humanity its first direct glimpse of this behemoth’s silhouette — a golden ring of radiation encircling a central void. The image, a synthesis of global radio telescopes working in concert, confirmed what theory had whispered since Einstein: the abyss exists, and it glows.

But seeing, as astronomers well know, is only the overture. The symphony lies in motion — in how that monstrous core spins, feeds, and breathes energy into the galaxy around it.

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II. The Spin that Scrapes the Limits of Physics

A black hole’s spin is expressed as a dimensionless parameter, $a_*$, ranging from 0 (no spin) to 1 (maximum theoretical spin under general relativity). Recent analyses — employing neural networks trained on millions of simulated EHT images — suggest Sagittarius A* boasts a spin of $a_* ≈ 0.9 ± 0.06$.¹

That is, it pirouettes at roughly ninety percent of the relativistic limit. At such velocities, spacetime itself is dragged around the black hole in a phenomenon called frame-dragging — an effect so severe that matter near the event horizon cannot remain still even if it wished to.

In essence, the very fabric of the cosmos is caught in its whirl.

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III. Pointed Our Way: The Axis of the Abyss

The same study reveals something even more serendipitous — the spin axis appears to be inclined at less than 30° relative to our line of sight.²

That is not to say the black hole is “aimed at Earth” in the sensationalist sense, but it does imply that we are observing it nearly face-on, rather than from the side. In celestial geometry, that’s a privileged vantage.

We are looking almost straight down the whirlpool.

This orientation, described elegantly in Astronomy & Astrophysics (June 2025),³ grants us an unusually clear view into the maelstrom — where magnetic fields writhe, electrons spiral at near-light speeds, and gravity distorts time and space into a perpetual hallucination.

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Image courtesy: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration — Polarised Light Study (2021).

IV. A Chaotic Halo, Not a Jet

Curiously, despite its ferocious spin, Sagittarius A* does not hurl colossal jets of matter like its famous cousin M87* in Virgo.

Instead, the radio glow we detect seems to emanate from superheated electrons gyrating in tangled magnetic fields within the accretion disk — that incandescent storm of gas and plasma circling the event horizon.⁴

Earlier theoretical models predicted a more ordered magnetic structure. Yet the 2025 EHT deep-learning analysis unveiled a chaotic field, fluctuating in time and intensity.⁵
This disorder is not failure — it is revelation. It tells us that the microphysics of accretion, magnetohydrodynamics, and energy transfer near black holes are far more intricate than even our most sophisticated simulations imagined.

Ignoramus et ignorabimus, as the Latinists would sigh: “We do not know, and perhaps shall never fully know.”

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Image courtesy : Hashem Al-ghaili / Science Nature Page

V. Of Collisions, Counter-Spins, and Cosmic Memory

The comparative study of M87* — another EHT subject — found something astonishingly opposite. Its black hole appears to spin counter to the flow of its infalling gas,⁶ perhaps the residue of a galactic merger eons ago.

That contrast — Sgr A* spinning swiftly with modest accretion, M87* rotating oppositely yet projecting monumental jets — underscores a profound truth: black holes are no mere drains of matter. They are dynamic engines sculpting the very architecture of galaxies.

In their spins are encoded the memories of cosmic collisions, the whispers of ancient accretion, the fossil signatures of galactic evolution.

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VI. Reflections from a Blue Planet

For an amateur astronomer watching from a terrace under city light, these revelations are humbling.

We stand on a small world, 26,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s nucleus, yet our telescopes — and now our algorithms — have reached into the furnace of relativity itself.

There is something almost mystical in the symmetry: the black hole’s axis aligned roughly toward us, as if the cosmos itself were affording humanity a fleeting glimpse into its deepest machinery.

One is reminded of Pascal’s lament — Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
And yet, in that silence, we listen more intently than ever.

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VII. Epilogue: When Shadows Teach Light

The study of Sagittarius A* has evolved from mythic metaphor into measurable science — yet its poetry endures.

Here lies an object invisible to the eye, governed by equations that warp intuition, yet illuminating more about the universe — and about ourselves — than any star could.

In that sense, the black hole is not a void but a mirror: of curiosity, of intellect, and of the human refusal to stop asking why.

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Sources and References

1. EHT Collaboration, “Estimation of the Spin of the Supermassive Black Hole in Sagittarius A*,” Astronomy Reports (2024), SpringerLink.

2. NASA / Chandra X-ray Center, “Sagittarius A*: Telescopes Support Event Horizon Telescope Results,” NASA.gov (2023).

3. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, “Self-learning Neural Network Cracks Iconic Black Holes,” Astronomie.nl (June 2025); Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 683, A37 (2025).

4. ScienceDaily, “AI Unlocks Milky Way’s Black Hole Secrets,” (14 June 2025).

5. A&A, “Deep-Learning Inference of Black Hole Orientation and Magnetic Field Structures,” (2025).

6. EHT Collaboration, “M87* Polarisation and Jet Alignment Studies,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2024).

7. Event Horizon Telescope Public Data Archive, 2017 Campaign, UI ADS (2022).

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© Dhinakar Rajaram 2025
(All rights reserved. Quotations and citations used under fair academic practice.)

All images used under educational and scientific fair use. Sources acknowledged individually. 

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