Black hole photo raises hopes

That photograph of a black hole has some people wondering whether we are alone in the universe. The odds are that we are not.

Taking such a photo has long been considered impossible, primarily because black holes have such tremendous gravity that even light gets sucked in and can’t escape. Scientist Albert Einstein figured that out years ago.

But earlier this month a team of 200 scientists on four continents used eight radio telescopes to snap the impossible pic. The collective effort was synchronized so they functioned like one big telescope the size of Earth. The Week magazine described the results as looking like “a radiant orange-red ring of superheated gas swirling around an ominous void ... where all matter and energy is sucked into no-one-knows where.”

For the record, the black hole is 25 billion miles across and located in the galaxy Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years from Alaska. A light year is the distance light travels in a year.

Writing about the black hole project in his weekly letter, Editor-in-chief William Falk said “there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars and probably more than a few planets where intelligent life has evolved and is puzzling over the same questions we are.”

That suggests the universe is so vast and distances so humungous that its intelligent beings are presumably far apart and unlikely to cross paths with each other. (My words, not Falk’s.) But considering that Earth scientists achieved what seemed impossible when they took that photo of the black hole, perhaps we should not be too quick to rule out the possibility of visitors from the far reaches of space.

I was thinking about that when I ran across a Washington Post article reprinted in the Anchorage Daily News saying that U.S. Navy pilots were getting frustrated because they were spotting unidentified flying objects but their reports are consistently ignored by military leaders. Their complaints prompted the Navy to develop procedures for reporting UFO sightings and commit to investigating them all.

Apparently such sightings have been getting more frequent since 2014 — multiple times a month — and the Navy brass has been dismissing the reports. In some cases the pilots said they saw small white spherical objects flying in formation. And the sightings were especially mystifying since all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power but the UFOs had no air intakes, nothing to use wind and no exhausts.

“It’s very mysterious,” said Chris Mellon, a former assistant secretary of defense, “and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed.” Mellon said the vehicles, if that is what they were, used a “truly radical technology.”

Considering what earth-bound scientists have been able to accomplish despite never sending humans farther than the moon, we may be assuming too much to think there might be intelligent beings aboard vehicles traveling from outer space.

The UFOs being spotted here might well be under the control of folks who live and work far away from Planet Earth, beings with no prospect of coming here. But you never can tell.UFOs have even been reported in Southcentral Alaska.

If you should see one, my suggestion would be to smile and wave. You never know who might be driving the thing.