Is it a coincidence: All cosmic black holes look like donuts, regardless of size

The first true image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (pictured below) isn't just a stunning scientific achievement - it's also strikingly consistent with previous predictions. Here's about black holes, like what they are and how they're formed by gravity.

According to DigitalTrends, the black hole Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole, usually found at the center of most galaxies. Our black hole is smaller in size than others: with 4.3 million times the mass of the sun, it is much smaller than other 'monsters' such as the black hole of the galaxy Messier 87 that has ever been discovered. photographed in 2019, has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun!

Black holes will look the same regardless of their size.

However, there is one thing worth noting: the images of the two aforementioned black holes look quite similar, showing a shape resembling a donut. And this inadvertently confirms the predictions of physicists, that black holes will look the same regardless of their size.

'The fact that the light appears as a ring, with a dark area inside, shows that it is purely due to gravity,' said black hole researcher Dmitrios Psaltis, of the University of Arizona. 'It's all been predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, the only theory of the universe that doesn't deal with (of objects) scale'

The conclusion regarding the size of black holes is actually quite unusual, because most things that exist at different scales will look very different - Psaltis gives the example of an ant and an elephant, which look very different because of the many factors, a major determining factor is their mass and how their bodies have evolved to support that mass. But black holes are not like that - they seem to be all the same no matter how big or small. Messier 87 is 1,500 times larger than Sagittarius A*, and also significantly wider (you can see it in the comparison image below). But the two look very similar.

All black holes will be shaped like a donut!

That means even very small black holes, if we could photograph them, would look like Sagittarius A* and Messier 87. They would all look like a donut!

'No matter where we look, we will see donuts, and they will all look the same,' Psaltis said. 'And the reason this is important - besides it confirming our previous predictions - is that nobody likes it. In physics, we often don't like a world where things don't have an anchor, or in other words don't have a definite size'.