If you want to stay grounded—that is, you want a haunting reminder of your own insignificance and mortality—do I have the right tool for you?Meet galactic compass: An app that leads users to Sagittarius A*, the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
As you read this, you are hurtling through space on a spinning, wobbling sphere that itself orbits a ball of hot gas at the center of the solar system. But if you zoom out further, our solar system is just the eye of a needle at the edge of the Milky Way, a galaxy 100,000 light-years across with a behemoth of 4.6 billion solar masses at its core.
Surprisingly, it’s easy to forget about the giant at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”). Like all black holes, Sagittarius A* does not emit light. However, its neighborhood is bright; As the black hole feeds, it pulls superheated material toward it, emitting large amounts of X-rays and radio waves.
The app was developed by Matt Webb (no relation to the Space Telescope) and released on the App Store last month. Webb created the app using ChatGPT and the development tool Xcode, even though he didn’t understand Swift, the language used to code iOS apps. You can read the full details of how Webb made the app on the hid blog, interconnected.
“Once upon a time I trained myself to always know where to look, and of course the center of the Milky Way moves throughout the day and year,” Webb wrote. “So I would end up pointing to the sidewalk or the street and thinking, ‘Well, that’s right there.'”
The app’s simple interface consists of a bright green arrow on a white background that points you to the center of the Milky Way no matter how you position your phone. And before you ask, yes: it has a dark mode.
Of course, the black hole itself doesn’t allow light to escape its event horizon, leaving the galaxy’s core pitch black. Nonetheless, the telescope (i.e. the Event Horizon Telescope) Can image the shadow of a black hole and the high-energy region surrounding it.
While the Galaxy Compass makes it easy to locate the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, other stargazing apps like Sky Guide and Night Sky offer similar functionality. Even if your favorite app doesn’t specifically list Sagittarius A* in its directory, it probably contains the constellation Sagittarius.This constellation is The key to finding the approximate location of Sagittarius A*, located near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpio.More specifically, it is located at Between Scorpio’s Tail and Sagittarius’ Teapot. By locating the area, you can identify the area of sky where the supermassive black hole resides, even though you can’t see it with the naked eye.
The Galactic Compass is a fun exploration ChatGPT featuresone can help you keep Global Galactic perspective as you move around the world.
more: Learn about the size of black holes in this new NASA animation