One of my students wrote his science report on the gravitational-wave signal received from two merging black holes discovered in September 2015 (not reported until February 2016). To better help him, I set out to research and update my knowledge. New information about “black holes” continues to pour in every year. What are these ominous, invisible, quicksand-like things in our universe? We can’t turn to The Urantia Book (The UB) for an answer. It never uses the term. But is there an equivalent in The UB? The “dark islands of space,” (The UB, 15:6.11) perhaps?
NASA’s definition, “A black hole is a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape. The strong gravity occurs because matter has been pressed into a tiny space. This compression can take place at the end of a star’s life. Some black holes are a result of dying stars.” http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-58.html
Dark gravity bodies, mentioned in The UB, appear to be separate entities outside of spacetime though perhaps a related force or energy. These “dark energy-charged spheres” (12:1.10), surround Havona, the central universe, “not a time creation; it is an eternal existence.” Black holes seem to be a local, in time phenomena.
The collapsing star, or supernova, model used to be the standard definition of the black hole when physicist John Wheeler first invented the term in 1967 (replacing “dark star”). I learned that the definition now includes 3 types, this most common one known as a “Stellar black hole,” the medium sized type.
My logical mind used to be bothered that the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy was a collapsed star. Not all supernovas end up as black holes by the way. Some become neutron stars, also a term not mentioned in The UB. Why would the center of the galaxy be the result of a supernova, an explosion? In the “friendly universe” model, it didn’t make sense to me, so I was relieved to learn our knowledge had progressed to include those not formed from dying stars. The other two types are: primordial, small ones from the time of the “big bang” origin of the universe, supposed to explain dark matter but no longer believed to do so; and the largest type, supermassive stellar black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy known as Sagittarius A.
Our Milky Way is described in The UB: “The vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton, being largely beyond the borders of your local universe. This great aggregation of suns, dark islands of space [there they are again!], double stars, globular clusters, star clouds, spiral and other nebulae, together with myriads of individual planets, forms a watchlike, elongated-circular grouping of about one seventh of the inhabited evolutionary universes.” (15:3.1)
A supermassive black hole is now believed to exist at the center of most galaxies according to the current consensus in our science. Images of the one central to the Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A, were captured by the Chandra X-Ray observatory in 2013. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/chandra-finds-evidence-for-serial-black-hole-eruptions.html
Are they round or spherical? Scientists believe if we could see the “event horizon” it would be spherical. In The Urantia Book they are “balance wheels.” Dark islands of space are not the devouring black hole monsters we’ve grown up with; “this great concentration of mass enables these dark islands to function as powerful balance wheels, holding large neighboring systems in effective leash.” (15:6.11)
In February 2015, an answer to the question of whether black holes were related to dark matter was offered. "There seems to be a mysterious link between the amount of dark matter a galaxy holds and the size of its central black hole, even though the two operate on vastly different scales," says lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2015-07#sthash.NLleFry9.dpuf
A Truthbook, http://truthbook.com/, staff member published an attempted answer to the recurring question, “Are these “dark islands of space,” described as part of our Milky Way the same phenomenon as the black holes in our astrophysics?” Their response (in 2014) was, “I am not sure if all Urantia Book students accept that black holes and the dark islands of space are one and the same, but it seems to me that they likely are.”
We find one described in our system Satania, “not a uniform physical system” (32:2.10) such as our Milky Way galaxy is (which you may recall is the central nucleus of Orvonton). Here is a direct correlation of our black hole concept with the dark island of space, both described as central; “The astronomic center of Satania is an enormous dark island of space which, with its attendant spheres, is situated not far from the headquarters of the system government.” (41:2.2)
”One Supreme Power Center of the sixth order is stationed at the exact gravity focus of each local system. In the system of Satania the assigned power center occupies a dark island of space located at the astronomic center of the system. Many of these dark islands are vast dynamos which mobilize and directionize certain space-energies, and these natural circumstances are effectively utilized by the Satania Power Center, whose living mass functions as a liaison with the higher centers, directing the streams of more materialized power to the Master Physical Controllers on the evolutionary planets of space.” (41:1.5)
After centuries of observing material phenomena, the universe that scientists have studied is now understood to consist mostly of invisible force!
“Gravity is pulling inward on space-time — the "fabric" of the cosmos — it keeps expanding outward faster and faster. To account for this, astrophysicists have proposed an invisible agent that counteracts gravity by pushing space-time apart. Based on the observed rate of expansion, scientists know that the sum of all the dark energy must make up more than 70 percent of the total contents of the universe.” That is the present assumption (2011); no one knows how to confirm its existence. (www.livescience.com)
How exceedingly ironic that scientists who’ve always pooh-poohed the spiritual presences in the universe must now try to understand how 70 percent of the energy holding the universe together is invisible!
